AU: Yes. Not in…[“Driving Miss Daisy”], but there were…. There are a lot of cooks involved in making a movie…and the writer's voice is not nearly as well-represented in a film as it is in a play. Of course, the advantages of writing a movie are that you get paid in advance…. In a play you don't get paid in advance, and you're sort of skipping from stone to stone all your life, you know…. Some playwright—I've forgotten who—said, "You can make a killing in the theater, but you can't make a living." In other words, you can have one hit play, maybe two, but there's all those years in between, all that time…. So I was very lucky in that I got into writing screenplays because of my plays, and I did it for 10 or 12 years. It supported me, and I just found that I was spoiled; I liked the theater better.

THC: Why did you like the theater better?

AU: Because it was me. I like the actuality of knowing it was alive every night, and seeing it in front of an audience, and having the actors take those risks that they took every night. Trying to remember the lines, trying to remember the blocking, what happens if they go up, what happens with that piece of scenery. It's alive. In the movies it's canned. You can be dead and still be really good in a movie, you know.

THC: What do you find most rewarding about writing, whether for the screen or for the stage?

AU: The most rewarding in the theater is standing at the back of the house and having people react to what you've done. It's really a wonderful, warm feeling. What I love, and what's also really rewarding in the theater, is the rehearsal period…. I've been very lucky with actors who are these talented, committed people, and who spend that period just thinking about how to interpret your work. Recently, “Driving Miss Daisy” was done in Australia by James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury. Now those are two big, huge theater people, both in their eighties...and they were both being so careful about it…. I mean, going over it with a little microscope. I thought, “My God, these geniuses are devoting all this time to my work.” It's very, very rewarding. In the movies—I hate to sound snobby—it's not that.

THC: What are the roles of theater and film in shaping the conversation surrounding highly politicized topics such as racism and religious prejudice?

AU: I think film and theater play an enormous part in our social conversations. I think the fact that there is such a film—that's successful—as “12 Years A Slave,” is a much better reference to that period of American history than, say, “Gone with the Wind” because it deals with actual things that really happened. It doesn't prettify anything…. I think a film like “American Hustle” is a good artistic representation of the 1970s in this country, and done very artistically. I believe that film, television,…certainly theater, has a lot to do with what we talk about, and I think it shapes a lot of our feelings.