I'm very excited about some of the novels that I have adapted. I think they're equally as powerful, if not more. Going After Cacciato (by Tim O'Brien) is something I'm very passionate about.

In the U.S., coaches could be the father next door. They had no formal training. They're like old hockey players. They don't go to school and study.

People think, sports delivers a message. It's not just about winning and losing, although that's important. It's about other things, too. It demonstrates how it can say certain things about your culture and your society.

Growing up, I didn't know very much about my heritage and the Soviet Union and things of that nature. But when I saw the Soviet Union play hockey for the first time, to me, it was profound.

Sports is like literature. People watch it and if it's beautiful and it's non-violent, whatever messages that you see, people can read into it and say, "Wow! You know what? Whatever they're doing over there, it's extraordinary, and maybe that culture is superior to ours in certain ways."

When I looked into the story of Soviet hockey and its players, I realized that it has nothing to do with hockey. It was a larger story using hockey as a window into the story of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian people, with friendships and betrayals, paranoia and oppression, and the meaning of sports to people and nations around the world, and how sports was used as a political tool.

When people do something extraordinarily well, it's self-evident. It could be art. It could be a circus, whatever it is, where people are doing incredible things. It's self-evident. You know that it's beautiful. You know that it's very difficult, but it looks easy.