Obviously, anyone who has seen Mr. and Mrs. Smith knows that husband and wife married spies is something that I find particularly interesting.

If you do something that's really original, you discover why everybody else does it the other way, usually. There's a reason cliches exist, 'cause they work.

It's very hard for a studio to take a chance on a piece of original material. They used to have the fall-back of DVD sales. They had ways in which they could safely make an investment in a piece of original material, and those opportunities aren't necessarily there anymore.

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.

Nothing I've done is like anything else I've done before.

It's hard to get a movie made about characters these days. We're in a climate where, unless it's based on a toy or it's a superhero where somewhere it ends in man - like Spider-Man, Superman or Iron Man - it's hard to get it made.

In particular, I'm drawn to the stories that have big, high concepts and real characters at their heart. And I love where those two worlds meet, and 'Edge of Tomorrow' is the perfect canvas to explore that.