I started studying mythology, just on my own. Joseph Campbell, mysticism.

The violence you witness is Denzel doing it and we're taking some visual effects and doing some things and you see something happen it's happening in front of you as opposed to cutting away and doing a bunch of tricks. It's in front of you. So it's hard not to make it a hard "R" if you see a guy get punched and teeth wind up in someone's knuckles.

I like making movies.

You want to take yourself seriously, and you want to make something that you hope will have resonance with the audience. You want to bring your perspective and what you consider your talent to that piece of work, and you move forward in that direction. Sometimes that's easy, and sometimes it's met with resistance because you're dealing with situations where, for everybody else, it's a piece of business.

Not harder than it should be, no. We're about the business, we're about the work. It's all about the work, always. We have fun and laugh and there're days that are more intense than others, but we're there to make it better. He's always going to try and make it better, I'm always going to try and make it better. So you accept anything, you accept whatever it takes to get it up on the screen and make it worthy.

I became a director just for the love of movies, because of the power of cinema.

I like being in real environments. I love being in the place that it's about - these sets and locations are characters in the movies. Can you imagine Breakfast at Tiffany's shot somewhere else? It's classic. Characters are part of storytelling; they're just as important as everything else.