I made this commitment to myself that I was going to be a writer. I figured, ‘Well I’m going to be a writer for the rest of my life.’ I had a book I got just out of film school that was a writer’s guide and it was interesting because they listed the produced credits of a writer but they also listed all the unproduced scripts the writers had written. So you’d get this many produced credits (indicates a small number) and this many unproduced credits (indicates a larger number). So you see even top writers write way more scripts then ever get made, and these are people who get paid a million bucks a script. So I just thought realistically film is a capital intensive medium. It cost now $50—100 million to make a movie. It’s  a little like architecture. Even someone like Frank Gehry will design 10 buildings and maybe one or two of them will get made. I think as a screenwriter you just have to assume that there’s going to be a 90% failure rate. As so I just thought, ‘Well, okay, I’m a screenwriter—I’m going to write one screenplay a year for the next 50 years so I’ll write 50 scripts. And if I assume a 90% failure maybe five of those scripts will get made and maybe two of them will be good movies.’ That’s just realistic. That’s not being overly pessimistic, that’s just what everyone else goes through. I wrote five scripts, then I wrote Little Miss Sunshine and then I wrote four more before I finally sold Little Miss Sunshine. It’s an endurance race.”

Michael Arndt