When you're a kid and you're a superhero lover, the holy trinity is Batman, Superman and Spider-Man, so to be able to take any of those and play with it is a huge joy.

An emotional story is an emotional story no matter how big or small it is.

As a director you have to be at 30,000 ft objectively looking at everything, wondering if you're making the right objective, emotional, story, character choices. As the writer, while you're asking all of those same questions, you're also forced by the nature of what writing is to be looking at everything under a microscope. That's the difference between the two jobs.

You always go by your gut. That's the best you can do. You go by what you feel, and you say yes or no based on what it inspires in you.

You used to have to make a choice. Is it a serialized television show, or is it a stand-alone or procedural? We were wildly influenced by The X-Files. Even when we created Fringe, it was the same thing. It's the gold standard of all gold standards, in genre television, and it was so wonderful because you felt so much for those characters.

I think what all the Universal monster movies are defined by, and what makes them very special, is that it's really the only genre entirely unto itself, in which you fear the monster and fear for the monster. That's a very hard thing to do. To fear for and fear at the same time is extremely unique.

I do believe that people go to the movies - for one reason or another - they go to the movies to have an experience.