It was just me, naked as underneath my clothes right now, as all of you are.

I would say, and this sounds like a rather immodest thing to say, but the truth is it's probably the most amazing thing of all, it's pretty much exactly what I thought we were going to make, what I hoped we'd make.

Archetypes are always [in my film-making]. It's sometimes interesting to just flip them a little bit and see the underside.

I mean, even in terms of the Marvel universe, this [Ancient One character] is going on a side street into a major piazza that Marvel hasn't even been to before, because it's all about creation and not so much about destruction and forestalling destruction, it's about your mind.

There are many graphic artists who have interpreted The Ancient One as a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, we're kind of shifting that a bit. We're trying not to be fixed, we're trying not to be fixed to any one thing, any one gender, any one spiritual discipline, and any one race even; we're just trying to wing it beyond that. So it's a new gesture really, just another interpretation.

I would rather be handsome for an hour than pretty for a week.

I live a soldier's life when I'm working. That's how it feels to me, except I've got a slightly greater chance of survival.