You hear people say that there's too much CG in movies today, but CG is what allows me to take a green-painted wall in a studio and make it disappear, and then put 100 miles of landscape in. CG, in the right hands, can be a marvelous tool.

I guess you don't make any franchise movies unless the fans are there.

To come up short when you reach too far is not such a bad thing rather than not to reach at all, right?

Had we had all the money in the world to spend and we were doing another studio movie, we probably would have jumped quickly into the Necromonger universe and done an Orpheus Descending movie there. We didn't have that kind of resource. So, we said, this time, "If not that, this time, then what is it? What does this new movie look like?" Quickly, just in talking about it very simply with Vin [Diesel] in his kitchen, we decided on a survival, left-for-dead story, where Riddick could, as a character, reclaim the animal side.

I don't want to have so much humor [in films] that it undermines the jeopardy, but enough to sometime relieve tension.

After I script the movie, I have to storyboard it out, I have to budget it, and I have to understand if I can afford all those visual effects or not.

Strangely, I always have a lot of cut scenes. I keep writing shorter and shorter scripts, thinking that this time, I'll get all my scenes in.