He said it was a masterpiece. That's the only time in the 20 years that I've known him that he's agreed with me on the first time.

Emotional truths can sometimes be conveyed more effectively, more compellingly, through fiction.

We wanted to move people emotionally, not intellectually. There's no message in the film except that life is hard, and that's universal. You cannot get away from the fact that it's two men, but we've all been in love; we've all felt these things. Life is hard, whether you find love or not.

A friend called me up and said there's a story in there you really need to read. So I read it, and I was just stunned, it just struck a chord in me. Then I woke up the next morning, and I was just emotionally exhausted, and I knew I had to read it again to see what had affected me so much. And it affected me even more in the second reading.

And it's still only 50 pages of the screenplay. It's only half of the screenplay. So we did have to make up the rest.

One of the jobs of art is to inspire discussion, and Brokeback Mountain certainly has done that. It's like a window and a mirror. You're looking through a window at lives you may or may not have experienced. But it's a mirror in the sense we've all felt lonely; we're all, at one time or another, looking for and hoping for love.