Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

The biggest challenge is not coming up with the stunt, the biggest challenge is designing a sequence around it that sort of justifies its existence.

When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.

Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd.

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

You know that certain things that you use in the film are going to be shown to audiences five hundred times before they ever sit down to watch the movie. So you have to kind of modulate what can I do to give marketing enough material but that I can still withhold certain things so that it's fresh and surprising for the audience coming to see the movie.

Normally, I tend to be a very binary filmmaker. You give me a problem and a destination and I say, "All right. If you want to get from here to here, there's a series of if/then's that will get you there. And if you have other stuff you want to do along the way, I'll give you all the if/then's that are caused by that."