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'm a writer who doesn't much think about money because money doesn't really care about me. In other nations, art gets subsidized. Writers aren't wealthy by any means, but there's the idea that the state supports the creation of art.

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.

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.

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."

Chloë Moretz as Carrie has an inherent amount of charisma, the camera loves her, she's been acting since she's five, she's a total pro, she knows her instrument. I took her on this phenomenal journey from a confident child star who has the great privileges of a family who loves her, great success, and huge confidence, to a wounded woman who had to gain her confidence back and desperately wanted love and acceptance.

I think it's always a challenge when you're telling a story that people know. But hopefully, good storytelling - well, there's two things. One is, you definitely have to have surprises and changes so that people are - you keep them interested, you take them down roads that they didn't expect and give them suspense and surprise.