I couldn't possibly have played someone with feelings towards a woman unless I had those feelings myself.
The first person to make me realize there was someone behind the film was Steven Spielberg.
If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation. In this play, I had a strong main character and it involved some creation around him. That's what I like about adapting that particular play because I added some maneuvering space as a scriptwriter to invent my own things.
I needed to create some dramatic tension to sustain the interest of the audience. For instance, the boy in the film is not in the play, so this relationship that he had with the former teacher, and his guilt, this is not at all in the play. I thought it would be interesting to look at in the film, and I added stuff like that around the main character. For me, it was not more difficult or less difficult.
In the private system and the private schools, the principal is pretty much a dictator. He or she can hire whoever she wants. Of course, in the movie, in the story, she makes a mistake by hiring him. But, if she doesn't, I have no story.
Any place where you have to deal with many social actors like a school - you have the parents, the Ministry of Education, the school board, and the teachers - you need all kinds of sets and rules. You're trying to foresee anything that can happen and everything becomes really rigid. They don't want to talk about death because they don't want to overwhelm the children, but that has already happened, so you're not going to overwhelm them more.
We also have this reflex of using specialists for everything, instead of having the person who is there every day with them, the teacher, talk about death and suicide. In the film, it's portrayed a little bit like a caricature, but it's the psychologist who comes in and Monsieur Lazhar does not think it's a good idea. He thinks he should be the one who should talk about that with the children.
Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.
Newscasters cannot call attention to themselves by being too attractive or too unattractive.
I think that Sarah Palin really missed the chance to educate the public on what some of the challenges her son is actually facing.