I love movies; I grew up loving movies. I've always loved movies. I never thought about making movies until I took art classes and then I started studying different artists. As you study paintings, you see light and shadow, of course - Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix. You start to understand the relationship between people and art, and images. For me, between movies that I watched and art, it was like, I'd love to make moving art. Moving pictures.

Even the Westerns that I grew up with, the Sergio Leone's and all that, there was always a sort of anti-hero, a guy reluctant to shame even, to pick up the gun again because he wants to help other people, and he does, he uses his skills for that.

I like the platform to show your art and everything that goes along with that. To show your voice and hopefully find films that are more politically driven, films that maybe inspire.

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.

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.

You could call it that [urban Western], I guess, you could certainly call it that. A lot of these types of films are, really, if you get down to the core most suspense thrillers in this genre, the Western is sort of the birth of it all.

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.