When the first movie to show the anger people have about the war is a grade Z zombie movie, that tells you all you need to know about how afraid of ruffling anyone's feathers people in the movie business are today.

I mean, movies are all geared to be basically under 25, and they're all tentpoles, explosions, excitement and all that - they take advantage of the big screen, which is great.

If you're doing a family movie, you don't want it to be stupid. Farting chihuahuas is not my idea of entertainment for kids or adults. So you try to make a movie that adults can see on one level, and kids can see on another.

Repetitiveness is one of the things that's most difficult to get away from in genre pictures, because people come specifically to see certain kinds of things but get disappointed if they're presented in the same way. So to try to find a new way to show old stuff is always the challenge.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

There's a way of thinking that comes with being an editor that is incredibly useful on the set. It's not just a vocabulary thing or a right-to-left thing or script supervisor stuff. It's a way of thinking about the film and the shots and the way they fit together, what you need and what you don't need, and what you can get away with if you have to.

It's a lot of power to give the director to edit his own stuff. It's also a time thing: you don't want to have to wait for the guy to finish shooting before he starts editing.