As a writer, it's fun to free yourself enough to tap into some darker elements of your personality that sometimes I don't even know exist. It doesn't feel like work.

Every movie is a surprise. That's what is so fun about it. You can be planning a movie for years, and then you'd better be surprised every day, or it's going to be stale.

If you have that group of people who are both nice and also creative, then you have surprises like a room with monkeys in them. That has taken a very good scene and just made it a great scene. I want my movies to be visually interesting and to have a lot of energy and be colorful and full of life.

For me, when I see movies where I kind of know who the characters are and what the situation is, I get bored. To me, it's, "How do I tell a story that will keep the audience engaged?" A great story does that: it's not exactly what you expect.

We're all so jaded. We've seen so many movies. We know what's going to happen in every single movie. I mean, there are some movies where I'm like why do I even need to keep watching? And so, if you can make a movie in which you're completely surprising the audience left and right, and left and right, then you've won. If a jaded film critic or reporter or an audience is like, "I didn't see that one coming," that to me is like a victory.

It's great when you can bait and switch people - and I don't mean that in a negative way, I mean that in truth. If we were advertising this movie as a very serious indictment about the hunt for war criminals, and it's a very dark drama, it would probably get great reviews, but people would stay away from it because no one wants to be lectured.

I feel like you can have entertainment, and you can laugh, but during that period of time you can also think, and people should get upset. America is spending a lot of time and money pretending to be searching for people who we're not really searching for. That is enough to get someone angry.