I mean, like, I can go in a room and say, look, 'Watchmen' should be at least 15 minutes longer than 'Batman.' I mean, that's, like, any geek will tell you that.

Look, if you have a problem with distilling the Battle of Thermopylae down to freedom versus tyranny, you need to read Herodotus because he's the one. It's his fault, not modern culture's fault. He did it.' [Victor Davis Hanson] references a lot of things like that because he feels like the spirit of the book and of the movie ["300"] are very close to the Spartan aesthetic. That's really kind of what he feels."

There was this interesting quote: try and live your life without fear and desire. It's this concept that's like when you look at a painting in a museum and you are held in aesthetic arrest. So the I, the ego, is stripped, is gone. The observer and thing become one. That's where fear and desire come in because you don't want to own it, possess it, desire it, and it's not moving you to fear. It's like you're in this harmonious state with the object.

I always say, thank god I have this job or I don't know what I'd be doing. It'd be sad. I've always felt like I have been trying to brand a world for a quite a long time. You know what though, I feel no different. I feel like I'm doing the exact same thing I did in high school. Only I have more people helping me out now. And we have to take it all the way.

I aim my movies, as much as I can, at myself. I think that those movies have an interesting quality. They're very movieish. They are movie movies. Like I think Watchmen is a very self-aware movie. 300. Dawn of the Dead definitely. That's really where I've ended up.

You can't will something into being. If you follow that philosophy all the way, to will something into being, that's animal style. That's what man does. But if you're looking at the philosophy correctly, and I never did - I like to think I did sometimes - you have to do it without ego, without the I. You have to separate yourself.

It's difficult to find a movie that feels true to itself. You feel the hand of Hollywood, the moviemaking by committee, on everything.