My mom and dad were divorced, and although they got along very well, my mom thought American television was reprehensible, so I was raised on the BBC. I kind of agreed with her. We watched American news, though.
I love a straightforward character. I am the guy who loves Cyclops on the 'X-Men', because he is square.
What I do like is hiking. And that's what filmmaking is. It's a hike. It's challenging and exhausting, and you don't know what the terrain is going to be or necessarily even which direction you're going in... but it sure is beautiful.
My deal with Marvel is I have a consulting deal with them as well as a contract to make 'Avengers.' That means I'll read all the scripts, I'll look at cuts.
Running a TV show is always running a TV show; it's never not running a TV show.
Movies were always the goal, but I had a lot of goals. Twelve-year-old me wanted to do everything: act and sing and paint and dance.
I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register. It's the old you-gotta-paint-like-them-before-you-can-paint-like-you thing.
What 'Scream' was great at was presenting ironic detachment and then making you actually care about the people that were having it, and juxtaposing it with their situation, all in the service of making a great horror movie. It was fresh.
An audience who watches my shows knows who I am, knows that right when they think I'm going to make a joke, I'm going to blow something up, or during the worst peril, I'm going to have someone give someone a kiss - it's just going to happen.
The Internet community started forming right when 'Buffy' started airing, and the notion of a show creator being anything other than a name people recognize on the screen was completely new.
I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, 'That's absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it.'
I had older brothers, and I don't think there's anything worse than an older brother. They pretty much told me the end of everything they got to see before I did.
I still believe that even though 'The Empire Strikes Back' is better in innumerable ways than 'Star Wars,' 'Star Wars' wins.
I have a pathological fear of confrontation. I'm working on that.
We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.
You know, the thing that I do to waste time is think of things I want to make. That's how my mind is employed.
There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'
Horror movies don't exist unless you go and see them, and people always will.
What I love most about icons is finding out what's behind them, exploring the price of their power.
When you're making a film, you have an obligation to fill the frame with life.
