I've been really happy to be in that conversation with Scott [Derrickson] for a few months now. We started chewing this cud a while ago. He is, as you probably know, an extremely erudite thinker in terms of religious philosophy and just thinking about a modern take on something really, really ancient, about how to imagine living beyond any physical bounds, which we're on the verge of now.

We talked [with Scott Derrickson] about making it kind of muscular and practical. Yeah it's a fantasy but what's the difference between fantasy and reality really?

Years ago, when James Bulger was murdered, every newspaper front page was talking about evil. At that point, having suppressed it for years, I remembered when I was four or five, I tried to kill my own brother.

I'll tell you one thing, and this is banal to say because it just makes it sound like it's all planned, and nothing is planned at all. But one link is with The Deep End, and one link is that I'm making a film later on that revolves around the relationship between an innocent party and a dead body.

I have this very strange relationship with my work, which is that it's like a conversation between me and it.

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.

Faith is in the eye of the beholder.