To be a lone filmmaker thousands of miles from home with nobody believing in me, that seems romantic.

The thing about TV is it's a meritocracy. I love that aspect of it - and I've had shows that have gone on the air and been canceled. I've seen the good and the bad of it.

I can't impress people with the pedigree of obscure French filmmakers that got me into film. It was Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg. I really thought I wanted to make dumb action movies.

I pride myself on doing character-driven movies and, when my movies have worked, it's been because of the right casting and the right character, and it just clicks.

My own personal process with movies is to develop the characters with the actors and, when I've done that properly, you can't imagine anyone else, but that actor, playing that part.

I'm a character-driven director, and I tend to fall in love with the characters in my movies and TV shows.

At the end of the day, I like the spy genre, as opposed to the action movie genre, because spies are smart. The successful spies are the smarter spies.