In 1998, Yelena Danova (who starred in my first film Foreign Correspondents) and another Russian actress named Olga Vodin hired me to write a script for them. The assignment: to adapt Anton Chekhov's The Seagull for the screen, updating the setting from a summer idyll in Czarist Russia to the Malibu of today. It was enjoyable but challenging work, requiring dozens… read more!