When you get that opportunity to be honest and open with somebody, for the first time, and share things about yourself that you haven't been able to share before, that you might be scared of or ashamed about, that's really exhilarating, and I think that's something that people will really identify with.

One of my life philosophies is that you have a choice to make when you're doing something creative. You can be cheesy... or you can be lame.

It's really hard to find just a simple character-driven drama, outside of a genre, that was available to direct, except for on TV.

I think that if you make something that's relatable then people will attach themselves to it. You can express it in a lot of different ways but I feel like as long as you are consistent and fair with the audience they'll engage irrespective of how they self-identify. I think it just gets too complicated to track all those differences between demographics.

I was a Marvel guy. I started reading comics when I was a kid.

I think it's really important, when you're redefining a character [ Spider-Man], for the audience to experience things that they haven't experienced, from the ground up. I wanted to build a character. I feel like point of view is a really crucial thing in the story, and that you need to build up the emotional building blocks, so that you can experience all the other emotions in a very specific way, rather than just experiencing it in an intellectual way.

For me, there were a few things in the Spider-Man comics that I thought were really interesting. There's this story about Peter's parents and where he came from, and I thought that it was really interesting to explore the emotional consequence of someone whose parents had left them, at a very young age.