I was always looking for a career that could combine my creative interests with my technical side, and it ends up directing films is the perfect combination.

The movies I make and my interests are always about pushing the technology as far as we can in support of telling great stories and showing an audience things they haven't seen before.

Tom [Cruise] is a great producer himself. He's got great sense of story. It's always great to have the perspective of the person who's playing the character in your film.

I don't think every movie should be made in 3-D, and it should depend on whether it's one of these films that's more immersive or needs to be taken to another world. I'm interested in other formats.

When I was in architecture school, rather than giving us drafting boards and t-squares and lead pencils and stuff they gave us all the same tools that places like Digital Domain and ILM used to make features films or special effects. They gave us all these digital tools like Alias and Mya and Soft Image and all these kind of high-end computers, so I came out of architecture school knowing how to use all that stuff. And I started making short films at night.

You won't believe how many people have congratulated me around the world for shooting a movie in 2D. It's bizarre. It's the strangest thing.

I think the excitement of movies is discovering stuff you weren't expecting, and I hope to preserve that.