The most terrifying thing in my life is a blank sheet of paper.

I'm all about real drama, real performance, and real people, so my twist on this is: I'm creating a family, a brotherhood here. I'm creating a very real chemistry and I have this incredible ensemble of actors led by Will Smith, who are basically playing dimensional characters with lives and souls.

The worst pressure is the pressure I put on myself.

For me, I like to show what guys are like when no one is looking and how we really are, and that we can be emotional and have these emotional lives. I think it would be great to do a film where we see some females and what's going on there when we're not around.

[If] you want to learn something about somebody, get into a fistfight. You'll learn more in five minutes than you will in five weeks of conversations. It's basic.

I'm a veteran, and I come from a family of veterans and people who served in that war. And the stories that I heard were a hell of a lot different than the movies that I was seeing, so I wanted to make a movie about the people that were really there.

The movie on the screen is always going to be different from the movie in your head. How it makes you feel is what I'm after, what I'm chasing, and what I'm trying to construct.