I see characters lying all the time in a lot of Hollywood movies. They can't do this because it would affect the movie this way or that or this demographic might not like it. To me a character can't do anything good or bad, they can only do something that's true or not.

Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns.

I actually thought that the idea of doing a World War II movie in the guise of a spaghetti western would just be an interesting way to tackle it. Just even the way that the spaghetti westerns tackled the history of the Old West, I thought it could be a neat thing to do that with World War II, but just as opposed to using cowboy iconography, using World War II iconography as kind of the jumping-off point.

When I'm writing in my bedroom, in a bar, at my kitchen table or wherever, I'm conjuring it all up on the page. That's all well and good, but it is going to be a limited perspective at that point and time. Occasionally, what I write might read really well initially, but then you change your mind while hunting for locations when you discover settings which offer even better opportunities for drama or dramatic staging.

Apache have the strongest nation in the world behind them. So we're going to inflict pain where our European aunts and uncles had to endure it. And so the fact that you could actually get Nazis scared of a band of Jews, that's - again, that's a gigantic psychological thing.

I am a genre lover - everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie.

Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I'm not interested in, I can't even feign interest.