[The first few days on the set were] sort of my trial by fire, ... Once you've set the scene, and you know the way you want to shoot it, and how you want to play it, you've got to get into the scene and forget everything else.

It blew a lot of tin off. It sounded like a sonic boom. The ball of fire and flames were on the east end. All I remember was seeing a huge ball of flames and black smoke. It's one of those things that happened, but you just can't process it at the time.

Had I known that, it would have added fire to my indignation.

[Bates had explored some of the themes of the story — depression, overcoming fears — before. Marriage, however, was newer territory.] It's always presented either as the romance or the tragedy, ... We don't look too often at what marriage really is. Marriage masks thousands of different arrangements — behind the scenes, it's all about change and negotiation and compromise. But we have the same attitudes toward marriage that we have toward death and dying — we want to sanitize it.

There's only maybe two pages in Jane's book that deals with the marriage because she was really talking only about her becoming an EMT and going through this midlife crisis, ... So when Alan Hines wrote the screenplay, he sat down with Michael Stern and really got down to the bottom of what was going on in that relationship. The work was there in the script.

I'm not that conservative. I do feel - I guess I'm more of a Democrat at heart, although I've never affiliated myself with a particular party.