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

The movie I end up with is the movie I aspired to make.

I realize I am contradictory: I have an independent filmmaker's sensibility and a Hollywood director's short-attention span.

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.

When I'm working on a film, I think about how it will play with a tiny audience of friends whose opinions I respect, basically a 40-bloc radius from my apartment in Manhattan.

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 think when the United States of America put a man on the moon in 1969, that was one of the greatest accomplishments mankind has ever done.