I grew up mostly in the South, and there's definitely something about the South that's different from the North. When people ask me where I'm from, I say Louisiana. I spent more years there than anywhere else.

I'm obviously really opinionated, but as a producer, you don't necessarily want the person you're working with to try to impress you - you want them to just be themselves.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

My father, who was the one who really got me hooked on movies, liked all kinds of films, and I saw all kinds of films at a very young age.

Stuff I like is getting trashed and stuff that is being praised I think is terrible. I don't really feel in sync with what's happening, but at the same time, what I think keeps me afloat is that I try not to be, and don't want to be, very indulgent. I try to make the films as lean as possible, and to not spend a lot of time crawling up my own ass creatively.

[I watch] Fincher, Spielberg, Cameron, McTiernan. Just people who are good at staging action. I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.

The muscle memory of filtering away all the wrong versions of what you're doing improves the more time you're on a film set. I feel like my problem-solving algorithm got kicked up a notch.