Steve Zaillian excerpts

Our brilliant Mark Feeney recently sat down with Steve Zaillian, the writer and director of "All the King's Men," which opens today. Not all of what Mark wrote made the final cut of his Sunday piece -- which, embarrassingly, is available on Boston.com for a fee. Here are out-takes.

The original film version [of "All the King's Men"], which won three Oscars in 1949, including Best Picture, never specifies where the story takes place. Neither does the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on which it's based. Everyone knows, though, it's supposed to be Louisiana, the home of Huey Long, the populist demagogue, on whom Warren closely modeled his character Willie Stark (played by Broderick Crawford in the original, a role which won him an Oscar; and Sean Penn in the remake, a role that might win him Oscar, or at least Oscar buzz). The new movie plunks the story down in Louisiana and makes no bones about it. As befits that setting, it has a nicely overripe look. Which makes all the more surprising that Zaillian should cite as an important source for him a gritty cinema-verite documentary by Robert Drew and Ricky Leacock. "I'd seen a film I found quite interesting, 'Primary.' It was an inspiration. We didn't use that style, but that's where we started from."

Zaillian, who won an Oscar for his adaptation of "Schindler's List," has long been one of Hollywood's top screenwriters. So how does he decide which of his scripts he does or doesn't direct? "Sometimes, honestly, I wonder if there isn't somebody who can do it better. I just did a script for a film called 'American Gangster.' I had the option to direct it myself and I felt, you know, there are a couple of guys who can do this a lot better than I could. So Ridley Scott is doing it."

There's at least one script Zaillian has long reserved for himself, though he has yet to get it made, Geoffrey Wolff's critically acclaimed 1979 memoir of his father, "The Duke of Deception." "After everything I finish, I try to get it made. I wrote it a long time ago. Getting someone to make a movie like that is very difficult. I think it's a very moving, very dramatic story. But when they run the numbers, as they say, it doesn't add up."