If we educate ourselves, then the desire and need to have art as a part of our lives will happen organically. I would invite anyone to look at cultures where art is squashed. Do you want to live in North Korea? We have a president who doesn't read at all. There's a lot to worry about. I just wish, as a collective, we were much smarter.

If I even tell anything false, within one minute I have to come clean. And I think most people, even if they're not that direct, it comes out in indirect ways. If somebody cheats on you, they end up telling you they've been spending all this time hanging out with that person. Why? Because nobody can bear a lie. A lie won't stay silent. It makes noise.

If you do really good storytelling, things that people also might anticipate and that they might have seen before - there's a reason we go back to stories that we love - so, even if there is a familiarity, if you can do it a different way and hopefully do it well enough, you actually feel the satisfaction of that anticipation given back to you.

If you're writing in the mainstream... Whatever that is - the norm. The norm is likely going to be funded because you're giving people what they're used to and what they're gonna get. But anything outside of that norm is going to struggle to get funded. The people who are not "the norms" deserve the chance to make art. I think it's great for all of us to consume all these voices, and that happens when you support these voices that need to be supported because they're not the automatic choice coming out of the gate.

I don't make movies about issues. This is my same litmus test for all the movies I love: Is it a great character on a great emotional quest with a great emotional need? Do they overcome great emotional obstacles? Is it a fantastic story? I didn't set out to be a political activist. I'm just a human being who's moved by certain things, and if certain things break my heart, I set out to fix them.

I think it's why we're able to look at with comic book stories or origin stories, why is it that we can keep retelling these stories over and over? And hopefully it's because it hits something so universal and so primal inside of us that we actually yearn for that same story over and over. But toned and different form, and updated and modernized, and I can go into the specifics.

You try to do as much as you can on set because practical looks cool and practical looks great. Until you get to a point where the reality is you look at it - and I went through this in my last movie which was a war film, which my brother fought in Iraq and I did a ton of research and as much as I could made it documentary-like - and then at some point on set, the reality is somebody says to you, "You know, you can use a real squib and you can have three hours of clean up and you can lose five shots or we can do that blood explosion in post and you can get those five extra shots."