Mr Attal, meet Mr Mankiewicz

Yvan Attal Joseph Mankiewiczat 1:16 of the interview of Yvan Attal on the DVD for Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants (Happily Ever After).which he wrote and directed as well as starred in with his wife Charlotte Gainsburg.

When I started to write I wanted to make a film with just three men. Maybe just seen in restaurants, in bars, at work, talking about their lives, without woman. But suddenly, I wrote that scene in the restaurant when the three guys are together and I didn't know, I didn't have a plan, a structure, you know, I just went to write, just like that, a scene, a scene, another scene. and suddenly, I wrote this scene in the restaurant and the guy --- the three men are there and they run into a woman he sees at school. so they have a conversation, a funny conversation about how to fluff(?) with this woman (indecipherable) and he says, "What do you know about married woman?" And at the moment when I wrote that dialogue I wanted to cut to Charlotte’s character and I imagined the scene at the Virgin mega-store. after I wrote that scene I realized that she was the character that I wanted to follow now. I didn’t care about the men.

From Kenneth Geist's Pictures Will Talk a biography of the writer-director of All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. (page 168) Mankiewicz speaking at a conference in Tarrytown NY in November of 1972
All About Adam could be done as a short.