I'm drawn to provocative characters that find themselves in extreme situations. And I think I'm drawn to that consistently.

I always want to make films. I think of it as a great opportunity to comment on the world in which we live. Perhaps just because I just came off "The Hurt Locker" (2008) and I'm thinking of the war and I think it's a deplorable situation. It's a great medium in which to speak about that. This is a war that cannot be won, why are we sending troops over there? Well, the only medium I have, the only opportunity I have, is to use film. There will always be issues I care about.

One of the elements in the film that really fascinated me was not to look at the world in bi-polar terms of us vs them or east vs west, which was a by-product of the Cold War.

War's dirty little secret is that some men love it.

Films don't cause violence, people do. Violence defines our existence. To shield oneself is more dangerous than trying to reflect it.

I'm interested in social commentary.

The Communist regime didn't consider this to be a shining moment in history and assigned no heroism to it. They classified it as merely an accident.