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.

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.

Stories of friendship are very interesting to me. Artificial families are something I like to explore. Whether it's a bunch of guys or a bunch of ladies, there's something interesting about that.

The worst part of directing is always seeing the first assembly. It's devastating. It really is. It's like going into the delivery room and you can't wait to see your baby, and it's a crocodile.

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.

[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.

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.