Before Danny Strong wrote Recount, a docudrama (airing on HBO May 25) about the 2000 Presidential election voting debacle in Florida, he was a successful actor. You'll remember his boyish charisma from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gilmore Girls. But it turns out, despite Strong's acting success, he's been a closet writer all along. Written By sent Nancy Kaptianoff to find out why. Here follows additional excerpts from her interview that were not published in the May issue of Written By:

Nancy Kapitanoff: Had you been writing before Recount?

Danny Strong: I had been writing specs for the previous three years. I had one spec blow up really big and it didn't sell, but it got me a ton of meetings, so when I came up with the idea for this, there were a handful of pretty good producers interested in hearing it from me. So that was how I was able to even get it in to HBO: I had four or five great producers who wanted it and I ended up with Paula Weinstein's company, which has a deal with HBO. It couldn't have been a better fit. But it's still a miracle that I sold it. I'm still shocked they bought it.

How did you decide on Al Gore's former chief of staff, Ron Klain [Kevin Spacey] as your protagonist?

I knew the story had to be Tallahassee-based, the epicenter of the recount, so I needed a lead character in Tallahassee and I wasn't comfortable putting someone as the main character who wasn't there. I came to it as a total blank slate when I started researching: I think there might be a movie [about the recount], let's see if there are people who can take us through these events. I discovered quickly this guy Ron Klain, a sort of de facto campaign manager who had been muscled out, yet who had come back in a low level position just to help out. This sort of soldier for the cause who ends up finding himself the de facto head of the recount. It was so inherently dramatic, a guy fighting a battle for a guy who had basically tossed him aside. I got the sense of him fighting to redeem his previous loss, fighting to be the guy who can pull up his sleeves and punch away. And he really did in the recount. Ron never gave up, even when everyone else had given up except Al Gore. Even after Bush v. Gore, he said, “No, we can do this, we can go back.” And everyone said no, it's over, you're crazy. “No, we can do this,” he kept saying. “We can go back to the Florida Supreme Court.” It was that fighter spirit I thought would just be amazing for a movie. That's a great character.

What is Ron Klain doing now?

Ron Klain is general counsel for a firm mass marketing health food products to Whole Foods and those kinds of companies, but he's still very involved in politics. He writes op-eds for the New York Times. He also is an advisor for presidential campaigns.

How long did it take to write the first draft?

I started in June and banged it out by mid-August and it was 210 pages. It took two and a half months, but  it was already structured, so it wasn't like I was starting from scratch. I had this moment when I came back, I wanted to incorporate all the interviews and I re-structured the entire thing in a scene by scene restructuring and think I had something like 90 scenes which would have been a 300-page movie and I figuratively had a heart attack. That was the lowest point of the entire process was the first attempt to structure it because it was overwhelmingly long. It was going to be a 300-age draft and I loved it all and I didn't want to lose any of it because I had discovered so much stuff in the interviews. I said to [a writer friend], “I can't cut it. I don't know how to cut it.” So we did but I still ended up with a 210-page first draft, which was so overwhelmingly long. But I had to write it like that. I'm really glad I did it because afterwards I cut about 30 pages in two hours-it was so clear what needed to go, and it was stuff that was kind of the most personal stuff. Lots of character moments had to go. The through-line became clear once I had it down on paper. The first draft I turned in was about 157 pages, which is not unreasonable. I got into the Writers Guild from this, selling the script.

Early in your career you worked for writer-director Gary Ross. Did he have any influence on Recount?

Not so much on the political side. It was one of my first jobs out of college. I was his third assistant, the 23-year-old runner who would go pick up Diet Cokes and his dry cleaning. But we would have conversations about screenwriting. He's one of America's great screenwriters, and he would tell me stuff that I still haven't forgotten. It was so helpful being around a guy like that. You just pick up stuff, and he's so generous too. He wants to help young writers and he likes talking about screenwriting, so he was a huge influence in that way.

Did Recount director Jay Roach work with you on the script?

Austin Powers, Meet The Parents, they're stylistically so different, but so successful at what they're trying to be. We liked the idea of having someone who could mine the lighter satirical stuff that is in the script. We wanted that to be there and so he just seemed like a great fit, and he's so smart. He loved the script, so it wasn't drastic changes with him, but we certainly made changes and he helped improve it tremendously. Everyone improved it. Sydney Pollack. I was so fortunate to get to work with such veteran, talented people that could really help steer it in a great direction.

Now you're writing a script on segregation for Gary Ross at Universal. Do you want to focus more on writing than acting?

It's been challenging. Right when I finished Gilmore Girls I shot a movie. And then literally two days after I finished that movie, I went straight into meetings with Sydney Pollack and have been working on Recount ever since. That's almost a year now, that I've been working almost non stop on Recount. I started a new script for Gary when the strike ended, and that's research-heavy so I've been researching for the last month. So I haven't been available as an actor and I just started auditioning again. I want to do both. I'm certainly more focused on my writing career now. They're my projects, until I turn them in and get slapped around by the producers, and I love them as projects. I love this project, Recount. It was so wonderful to work on and rewarding and exciting. On the acting front, I as a writer, it's like they're your children and as an actor they're your really cool friends. You can't really compare them.

What's important about Recount?

One of the most important things the movie has to show is the voter purge list. People don't know about that. They don't know about the voter purge list that existed in Florida in the 2000 election. It was intentionally, grossly inaccurate. 20,000 people [barred from voting in the Florida Presidential election] and that number comes from the lawsuit that ensued over it between the NAACP and the State of Florida. And in the settlement of the lawsuit, the State of Florida had to take 20,000 people off the voter purge list and put them back on the voter rolls, but then the State still didn't do it. In 2004, they didn't even obey the suit's judgment. But what they did do in 2004 was they took all the Hispanic names off the voter purge list. Who did Hispanics vote for in Florida? Most were Cubans and they voted for Bush and the Republicans in 2004.