The actors come in and they make characters their own and so Patrick and I have never been the kind to think that our script is the bible. We want to make sure that the story is told, that you stick to the story but if you have to make changes to the character then that's fine. A lot of times there are some funny one-liners, funny things that happen that are out of the ordinary. I like it.

This as hard an R as we wrote in the beginning. It was fast. It was fast mainly because of De Luca. We came in with De Luca. Nic I think had a deal with Millennium and so we ended up with Millennium quickly and they said, 'Go make the movie that you want to make. Basically, here are the ground rules; stay within the budget, stay within the time and go make your movie.'

The reason that I'm here is that Patrick and I are partners and when crazy stuff comes our way we'll sit down and brainstorm and think around it just like we do when we're thinking about a scene. So, while the masters might not understand my being here, or at least they didn't at first, but they do now because we really are a partnership. If he's on set I'm on set.

I love the 3-D. I'm not one of those guys who's scared to death of it and think that it's going to take over everything. I love the fact that you have the immersive 3-D and the voyeuristic 3-D and then you have the in your face gimmicky 3-D and we're going to do both. I think there's a place for both.

I think longer that you sit on a screenplay the longer you sit. I'm a firm believer that you can write the magic out of a movie, out of a screenplay. I'm not saying that the first draft is always the best draft but a lot of times the magic is in the first couple of drafts. T

Nic [Cage] is more than just a fantastic actor. He will get your movie made. The first thing that we did is that we went to producers and there were a lot of great producers.

It's not like we were forced to do something we didn't want to do. I mean, when you see that scene you'll realize that we're really lucky that the weather came at us because now it has a lot more meaning that wasn't automatically there. There's some sort of undertones that wouldn't have existed had we shot it outside. So we got lucky on that and what we try to do is take whatever obstacles come our way and make them work in our favor.