Michael Crichton talks about directing in this excerpt from “A Cure from Box-Office Atrophy from a physician who likes to play doctor” by Digby Diehl in Signature magazine from 1978.

“Working in films has been good for me personally. I came out of medicine with very autocratic attitudes, ‘Do this’ or ‘Do that,’ and having it happen. It doesn’t work that way in movies. You are obligated to cajole, convince, and persuade people rather than order them. Because filmmaking is such a collective effort, you also learn a lot about compromise. It has been a healthy contrast to the lonely fantasy life of writing.

There is something very concrete about working on a movie. There you are, surrounded by sets with wallpaper and furniture and lights that are all real — but they are all illusion, too. When you sit at your typewriter writing books, it is all in your imagination, there isn’t even that illusion. I suspect I will eventually come to some point where my book projects and my movie projects will be quite separate processes for me.”