I'm not a Hollywood basher because enough good movies come out of the Hollywood system every year to justify its existence, without any apologies.

Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life.

A movie doesn't have to do everything. A movie just has to do a couple of things. If it does those things well and gives you a cool night at the movies, an emotion, that's good enough.

Everybody always talks about the science fiction genre, in particular, which always makes me think about people in spaceships. I can appreciate that, but that's not really where I think my dramatist aspect lies.

And by banning [smartphones] from the set, the whole crew tends to work tighter with each other. And then it just becomes a thing where people kind of fall in love with the idea, 'This is the film-industry that I signed up for! This is really wonderful.' But then they go back to another set and everybody's on their cellphone, everyone's in their own little box, and they get depressed about it.

You can do all these kinds of things that are up close and personal, but you really have to bring your strength, and really - you have to really be committed to actually strangle the life out of somebody, to crush their larynx and just squeeze every drop of life out of them.

My writing's like a journey. I'll know some of the stops ahead of time, and I'll make some of those stops and some of them I won't. Some will be a moot point by the time I get there. You know every script will have four to six basic scenes that you're going to do. It's all the scenes where your characters really come from.