THC: How much involvement did you have in the actual script?

TM: A lot. Dennis, Andrew and I sort of have a process, which is we'll all write separately. We would talk about scenes that we wanted to do, and whoever had the idea, or whoever had a grasp on a scene or a monologue or whatever, they would write it, and then we'd bring it back in, and we would go over it together, and that was sort of how we worked. And when I look at the movie now, it's funny, because I can see things that Dennis wrote, or things that Andrew wrote, or things that I wrote, and it's distinctive from each other, but it's all part of Leon.

THC: How much of a hand did you have in casting? TM: Also a lot. They gave me a lot of rope to hang myself, I don't know why. But I think it was because I created the character with Andrew and Dennis, so I had a good understanding of what I wanted. So I hired a director, and it was my idea to cast Billy Dee Williams. Julianne Moore was the first person to come on the show who wanted to do Ladies Man, so when we had the green light for the movie, we sent her a script, and she said she wanted to be in it. So that was how we got her. As for Karyn Parsons, we were getting ready to shoot and we hadn't yet found a Julie, and finally Karyn sent a tape, and everybody loved her. It was easy for me to do Leon with her, because she understood how I worked with improvising and stuff, and it was a great chemistry. So, I was very instrumental in casting, but I can't take all the credit, because [director] Reggie did a lot of that too.

THC: Are you ever surprised when something catches on that you don't think will catch on? Like with Ladies Man, were you surprised at how well it did?