I am a huge fan of what Marvel has established. But when they first came to me, Thor and Captain America were not even close to being finished. I thought to myself, 'Okay, you have all these moving parts, but how can you possibly bring them together?' Iron Man, Hulk, Thor and Captain America don't seem like they could co-exist, and ultimately that is what intrigued me and made me think, 'This can be done and this should be done.' You can't put these characters in a movie together without a certain amount of humor. It's an inoculation against the unreality.

We have done the impossible. And that makes us mighty.

I think [there's] the opportunity for - I almost said President Clinton, and soon I will - but for Hillary Clinton to address that, and for the public sphere to address that in a way that they haven't. We started a conversation in the last few years on race that we desperately needed to have.

'The Dark Knight,' for me, has the same problem that every other 'Batman' movie has. It's not about Batman. I think Heath Ledger is just phenomenal and the character of the Joker is beautifully written. He has a particular philosophy that he carries throughout the movie. He has one of the best bad guy schemes.

I'm the least confident person in so many ways. But I believed that if somebody gave me the chance to tell a story, I would tell a story [well enough] that the person who gave me the chance would get their money back.

Everything is so fragile. There's so much conflict, so much pain... You keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize this is it; the dust is your life going on. If happy comes along - that weird, unbearable delight that's actual happy - I think you have to grab it while you can. You take what you can get, 'cause it's here, and then... gone.

I think the Trump thing is particularly egregious, and I think he's as much a product of the GOP lie machine in the era of Roger Ailes as he is of television. And also, of the Twitter era. Of the everything-is-as-reductive-as-it-can-be. To me, the most telling thing is we have a man who cannot complete a sentence. Certainly could never get to 140 characters, or past it. He thinks in tiny little bursts - the way he tweets.