I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.

My father's book is about is about a number of things, but about Houdini's rage to not be a failure like his father, and it's also about converting X-rated material, namely bondage, into family friendly safe fare, which is what he did. It's also about death and resurrection, and rising to live again another day when everyone thinks you're dead.

The naive thing I suppose is simply that we thought, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, that we had reached the end of history and we were entering a brave new world minus the Soviet Union where everything was going to be peaches and cream.

Actors will change their face, will change their hair, will change their voice, will disappear into the role. A movie star doesn't disappear.

We were extremely prescient in that we predicted the Soviet coup before it happened. That was kind of amazing.

I'm not really interested in the exploding car or endless sort of dystopian fantasies and superheroes. None of that... that doesn't interest me very much.

Once you decide that you're going to have the death of Spock, then how does that affect the other people? Why is it there? I got a lot of stick from a lot of people from the very beginning about the idea of killing Spock. Somebody said, "You can't kill him." And I said, "Sure you can; the only question is whether you do it well."