I'm not looking for is the audience going to like it [the film during the first screening] or not. I want to hear somebody try to poke a hole in it. I want to hear why they saw the logic was flawed or why that scene was not believable.

The action pictures I've been typically involved with, when somebody gets punched, you really feel the punching, and when somebody gets shot, you really feel the shot.

My experiences with the older audience and, selectively, the people I hang out with or run into, they all want to see Arnold [Schwarzenegger] kick some ass.

I always consult five to ten people who are hardcore fans, to see how far I can push a role. When they go, "Wait a second, you can't do that! That's a sin!," you go, "Okay, fine, we're not going to do that. We tried too far."

What I keep searching for in movies, more and more, is the right gravity.

We've never pulled from the toy line. We've always pulled from the mythology. What's great is there's so much mythology, so there's always stuff to pull from that. It never lines up perfectly for a movie; it's just like adapting a book or anything else, you know? But you come up with things to create, you come up with different ideas, but fundamentally the ideas always start from the mythology.

Everybody has a background. Everybody has a past. Not everybody's the same person all the way through.