That's where the inspiration was and so the more that you rewrite and the more you rewrite and the more the numbnuts are coming in to give you notes then the more problems you run into and the more it suddenly doesn't seem like the movie, the story, the characters changed, watered down and we don't have that with this.

Nic is definitely a car guy because Nic and [William] Fichtner and Billy, these guys go on and on about the cars. So we had no choice but to do our research and get everything right because they were going to nail us if we didn't.

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.

There are moments, moments of fun but it's never necessarily a wink/wink. It's just interesting and odd and crazy things happen inside the world just like a crazy thing happened inside our world. So we don't shy away from that stuff. We take semi-ordinary characters, even though they have their own skill sets, we take those guys and we drop them into extraordinary situations and watch how the get out of them.

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.

As long as we work within the budget and are responsible, which by the way it's amazing how many people aren't but we are. We've worked within the budget. We've worked within the time and we're making the movie that we want. That's the reward and I couldn't be happier.

It's a road movie [Valentine]. I mean, yes. We film it here and it takes place from basically Colorado to Louisiana. That's the road trip. So we're all over the place. We go through bits of Texas and bits of Oklahoma.