With the CGI suddenly there's a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don't need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion.

Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.

The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago and they're all driven by the possibilities of CGI which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.

There are only so many movies you can direct. And yet there are movies that I want to make sure make it to the screen in as honest a way as possible.

It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.

You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.

A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in you know just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing a character came sort of strolling in and I realized Oh my God I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

You know if you look back in the 1930s the money went to infrastructure. The bridges the municipal buildings the roads those were all built with stimulus money spent on infrastructure. This stimulus bill has fundamentally gone started out with a $500 rebate check remember. That went to buy flat-screen TVs made in China.

When I sent those scripts that was the lowest point of my life. We'd just had our second son and when I went to collect them from hospital I went to the bank to try and get some money to buy some diapers the screen showed I've got $26 left.