I think that one of the most exciting things about making films is the sort of reaching out to the world. It's as an ambassador. You realize the more you travel that you are a cultural ambassador for your own country. You never become more patriotic than you do living abroad.

It takes the wool from your eyes about how the world works, to show you that nothing's necessarily fair, and that you might have a hard life.

They're always surprised with what I want to do and don't want to do. I think they're surprised I don't want to do robo-tech. I don't know, it's like they want me to have a long career. And be prolific and make big movies.

I'm pretty hard to impress, and I'm pretty exacting, in terms of what I want from my props department and art department. We spend many, many hours going over visual research and finding the right artists to create the material.

As a director, your job is to make sure no one for any reason is taken out of the film. Sometimes it's impossible and sometimes things don't come out the way you want them to, but I think you have to work really hard at making the world engrossing and details are a major part of that.

It's nice to represent to other people in the world that Americans actually do know what's happening in the world, can speak other languages and are conscientious. The perception quite often is that we don't know what's beyond our county line.

If you think of most murders as being between people who know each other, it's very easy to figure out who the killer is. But when you have a murder that appears random, where the person is not someone that's within the known radius of the victim, then it's much, much more difficult to solve.