It's been reinforced to me, and it's a little cliche, but I've learned that you can't make a movie that even works, much less that's good, without really good writing and really good acting. That lesson has led me to not be distracted, so much, by the other stuff going on in filmmaking and to focus on the essence of a story, and the words and the events and the way that those are interpreted by the actors. That philosophy has taken me to a place that I really like.

You have to look also to the media, where you have a vast majority of the loudest and most influential political voices in America media from people who came from the entertainment world.

Everyone has a different approach, but I like to shoot a lot of film anyway.

To answer the question, though: I didn't always want to direct. I just liked the idea of it. If a friend was making a short and needed someone who knew screen direction, I would jump in. It would be horrible, but it led to a short, then another, and another. It was like student films.

I like the incongruity of how in Iran, these people we think of as being revolutionaries or fanatics or whatever are just as aware of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader as our people are back home.

Clearly, there's a real onus on you to do something correctly when everybody, at least in the United States, had a really clear, specific idea of what this guy looked like - and even more so, what he looked like as Clark Kent and as Superman. You have this whole vast audience of people who would be acutely aware of any deviation whatsoever and probably holding you to a slightly higher standard as a result.

One of the things it channelled in me was that experience that I'd had of wearing a big red leather thing on my upper torso in Daredevil with a mask I couldn't see through and an outfit that completely inhibited movement, feeling humiliated and like a fool. I just recalled that.