Actors are insanely competitive and they hold back on each other. They are like magicians and none of them want to show their tricks.

I'm one of those big believers that the movie comes together in the way it's supposed to be and that movies are fated to become what they become.

I'm not a film-school guy. I was a high-school dropout. I was on a nuclear submarine. I was an electrician. I was a house painter. So if you get in my face, I'm going to fight you.

The worst pressure is the pressure I put on myself.

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.

You don't want to get too far ahead of the audience and you don't want the audience to be ahead of you. So, that balance is difficult and it takes a lot of work and tuning in the edit, to get the right balance.

In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.