I would be lying to you if I said I wouldn't love for it [Equalizer] to become a franchise, I would love for it to become a hit and all that great stuff. Who knows-you just make the best movie you can make, you know it's like, eat the whole thing, one piece at a time. And then, we'll see what happens, I would love for it to be.

I've become friends with Michael Mann and Oliver Stone; I've seen those guys work and that was great to see.

My experience of test screenings is that you don't know what kind of mood people are going to be in, and sometimes the studios accept what Joe Blo says - and this guy could just be a frustrated filmmaker, or not paying attention.

The outsider hero is hero riding into town, he's the gunslinger, shame - the same thing, he didn't want to do it anymore, he wanted to live a different life but part of who you are sort of haunts you and you can't run away from evil and if you have special skills, and most people are mistreated, which is unfortunately in our world, we always need an equalizer, that type of character to come to our rescue.

So it's hard to be an artist and be true to the reality of the world you want to create and also make it entertaining and successful financially.

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.

You'll see in the movie he constantly does that-he only drinks his tea a certain way, brings his own tea bags, the guy pours hot water, it's like a consistency throughout the film, but he never breaks his habits. I mean, to a point, where he has to.