Ray Pride has a great interview with Tamara Jenkins, the writer-director of The Savages. Have not seen it yet, but loved her first movie from many moons ago, The Slums of Beverly Hills. Here she is on writing

Yeah, and you’ve sucked out all the descriptive juices because that’s what you’re going to see and that’s what people are going to do. It helped me when I got stuck to just pretend it was just a novel, to just keep going and write this stuff that I eventually would rip out, stuff that had to do with describing internal states — things that you would never really be able to have in a screenplay. And it was really long — the first draft of the script was 200 pages. In a weird way, I felt like I wrote a novel and then had to do an adaptation of the novel to turn it into a screenplay, which brought it down to 120 pages. I spent a year going from 200 pages to 120 pages, and it took me years to get to the 200 pages. So a year to kind of, what’s it called, reduction? When they do that to a sauce, the reduction sauce?