I am, at the end of the day, a guy who loves story.

Superman, when he's fighting you, isn't like Batman. He also isn't like Spider-man, who will bully you and make fun of his villains. Why do you think Spider-man's villains all hate him so much? Maybe because as he breaks their bones he's mocking them! Batman's villains are all insane! Superman, when he goes after someone, is essentially not trying to beat them. He's trying to save them from themselves.

The Hulk, a being of pure tortured id, bipolar mania unbound, sprung from the subconscious of a repressed, scientist with a dark childhood.

What it comes down to is I don't mind if Superman kills people because he has no reason not to kill people. I know that one of the tenets of the character is that he doesn't, but the reason that he doesn't is because having that much power makes you responsible for weaker people.

Pied Piper' came to me all at once; I wanted to do a fairy-tale movie with some edge, but not 'dark,' per se.

You usually find me writing what I like to think of as intelligent summer action and genre films.

I began to pick apart our knowledge of Frankenstein and discovered that the public's idea of this myth comes from a million different places... I became committed to recontextualizing it all so it all worked in one story.