I think it's very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks.

An action film can have too much action; picture an equaliser on a stereo, with all the knobs pegged at 10. It becomes a cacophony and is, ultimately, quite boring.

I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.

Sometimes I'll have a scene that strikes me, I just feel like writing a scene, a mini-story that seems like it might lead somewhere. But that is such a tentative, fishing-hook way to go about it that these days I've found it's easier to kind of at least have your concept and start attaching things to a skeleton. So I try to find the armature, the kind of backbone of it first that you can start to hang those scenes on.

Every director should take an acting class. At least one. You know, you panic with actors. It's like, "Okay, this is back in college, I know how to talk to these guys. I know their vocabulary, and I get what they're saying back to me." So basically to learn the vernacular of acting, that's very important.

For years I was doing the excruciating weightlifting of writing scripts - but then I stayed thin and someone else got all the muscles.

I think it's very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks.