This is from the New Yorker:
"He's the latest in a long line of Schrader's troubled loners, stretching back to Travis Bickle, the Robert De Niro character in "Taxi Driver," which Schrader wrote and Martin Scorsese directed. Why all these disaffected drifters? "They say you never forget the music that was playing when you first fell in love, and that was the nou Abu Ghraib torturer. In music that was playing when I fell in love with cinema-that kind of agita,"
Schrader said. "You have a problem and you have a metaphor, and then you have a plot. When I wrote Taxi Driver,' the problem was young-male loneliness. The metaphor was the taxicab. Great metaphor! And so metaphor for a person who's been deadened by his own guilt is counting cards-it's a non-life. You see these commercials of people in casinos laughing and having fun. When was the last time you were at a casino and saw anybody laughing?"
"You have a problem and you have a metaphor, and then you have a plot." is great.
It's also a great way to do a presentation.