Sometimes there's a disjoint between what works on the page and what works with visual story telling.

We can't tell particularly smart stories if we want to keep our audience big enough to pay for these big spectacle films that we want to do.

The films that I loved growing up were the science fiction films from the late seventies and early eighties [films], which were more about the people and how they are affected by the environments that they are in. Whether they are sort of futuristic or alien of whatever they are; that was the science fiction that I loved. So that is what we tried to make, the sort of film that felt like those old films.

As soon as I finished film school I was thinking about, how do I get to feature films? It took about eight years, and I'm still working. Feature films was not the end goal. Feature films was one of the stages. Getting to the point of the Coen brothers or Tarantino, where you're writing your own material and have the budget to do it properly, that's the end goal, and I'm close to that.

Every film I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I'm working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.

I do enjoy the puzzle-solving aspect of making a movie.

I think there is also a certain degree of expectation that's set up by trailers, where even if you know what's going to happen in parts of the film based on the trailer, you almost anticipate and look forward to those moments based on having seen the trailer.