When Dick and I sat down and started to talk about it, Dick said "If can make the love story work between the guy and the girl, Superman and Lois, we can get the audience to root for these kids to get together, then we got the movie and I know you can write the Lex Luthor stuff etc.". And we have to make the growing up in Smallville emotional and we have to make Krypton emotional. Write it like it is happening.

It's no accident that the first line of the movie is "This is no fantasy, no careless product of wild imagination." I know that because I only saw it the other day. But I did that on purpose. There was a two page scene in the script as it existed, it was the balcony scene and it was played for comedy. And I expanded it to six or seven pages, which was used as the screen test scene; the interview and then he takes her flying. I called Dick up and told him that he ends up taking her flying; he said, "That's the picture - that's the picture." You've got the romance and on purpose I wrote the line about Peter Pan -- meaning this is real, obviously it's not real if you're sitting in the audience but we kept harping back to the fact that it's really happening.

The illusion is that God sends Christ to Earth. I was telling my students yesterday whilst watching Brando, a film directed by my father, Julius Caesar, and it was first time he had done Shakespeare in his life, and never even done it in class. He won the British Academy award and, as my father said, "The Brits would rather slit their throats than give an award to an American - their Oscar for Shakespeare."

When we were going over the speech (soliloquy to baby Kal-El), Marlon and I, there was this very funny thing, Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter and we got to the line, they could be good people Kal-El, if they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. Marlon says "That's iambic pentameter." I said "What?" He said, "They only lack the light to show the way," I said, "Son of a gun", I didn't mean to, but the fact that an actor could remember after 26 years, he never played Shakespeare again, I mean Julius Caesar was in 53 and this is 1978, I couldn't believe it.

Bob Benton's one of the great screenwriters of all time and again, disastrous casting for this. If you look at Kramer vs Kramer or Places in the Heart, the guy who wrote that has got no business writing Superman. I called him up before I went on it and asked "If he had any objections," because he is a very good friend of mine and he said, "I have absolutely no emotional attachment to the script at all, please go on, you'd be great. Right up your ally."

From the moment I came on the film we did a lot of the casting together, we looked at every test together, we picked locations together and I was on that film for well over a year, and at the end of my service on the film, finally, before Superman became a way of life, Dick said that I think you deserve a separate credit on the main titles, you've done so much than write the pictures and I said, "Thank you, I'd love to have one," even if it means giving up residuals because of the year of my life or more that I put in, and it was a very strange thing, because the title "Creative Consultant" had never been on a movie before in the main title like that and because there was, and I was completely unaware of it, such a hurry to finish the picture in time. I mean Deluxe was flying prints out two weeks before opening, I had no idea my name was coming after the writers, which is a total no-no.

The WGA, DGA and everyone else, they say "Writer, Producer and Director." You don't put a writer with another title after the writers, it's just not done and the Writers Guild sued me, in the sense that they called me to a hearing with the head of the guild and everyone else, including Warner Bros. legal department. I showed them thirteen round trips to London after I finished writing - then it was the editing, the scoring, and I said that it really reflects what I did and I'm so sorry about the placement of it because I didn't know that was where they were gonna put it there and they said, "Fine, but in Superman II we'd like to correct it, it should come before the writers", which is what happened. That's how that credit came and subsequently outlawed by the Writer's Guild. It's called the 'Tom Mankiewicz rule'. Informally, there's no such thing as a separate title called "Creative Consultant" anymore.

And like the Clint Eastwood rule under the DGA, he fired the director on Josey Wales after two days and took over. You can fire a director if you want to but nobody from the production can take over the direction, and that stops the producer becoming the director, the actor and everyone else, you just have to hire an outsider. That's called the Clint Eastwood rule. There are certain informal rules…