Trust me: you make a movie about time travel, and you know for a fact humans will never travel through time. The paradoxes that come up just from trying to tell a story with time travel really illuminates the fact that it's impossible. It will never happen. We can barely get through a movie that involves time travel.

If you go to a restaurant with Tom Cruise, it's like walking in with Santa Claus. Everybody is in a better mood because he's there.

The thing about TV is it's a meritocracy. I love that aspect of it - and I've had shows that have gone on the air and been canceled. I've seen the good and the bad of it.

Almost anything can be justified as a style of filmmaking if it works.

The more real I got on 'The Bourne Identity,' the more interesting it got. So 'Fair Game' was the chance to go a few more steps in that direction. In fact, I discovered this whole other world that I had ignored in the 'Bourne' franchise, which is the domestic life of a spy, and how you make the two halves of your life coexist.

When I was shooting 'The Bourne Identity,' I had a mantra: 'How come you never see James Bond pay a phone bill?' It sounds trite, but it became the foundation of that franchise.

To be honest, when I started watching VR content, I was mostly disappointed and thought people could do better - not that different from when I set out to make 'Swingers' and thought, 'There's a better way to make an independent film.' Which is why 'Swingers' ended up being so much less expensive than anything like it.

With VR, you are directing in a 360-degree environment. The biggest challenge is that the viewer can look anywhere. They might look at the the weakest moments, the very things you edit for TV. You don't control where they look.

All of my fellow directors, I think, would agree that in whatever medium you are working, the challenges and obstacles push them to be more creative. That's the case with VR.

From a production point of view, I still have one foot firmly planted in the independent film world, and much of the shooting on 'Jumper' was done 'Swingers'-style because that was the only way we could afford to do it.

When I read the script of 'The Wall,' I saw how much different the war looks from the point of view of a soldier fighting it.

There's no reason my films can't work as hard as VR does to hook an audience and never let them go, so I think that that it turns the volume up a little bit on storytelling. The same way when I was doing commercials and then I went and shot 'Go,' and 'Go' has a level of pace that is unlike any of my other movies.

The one thing about reality is sometimes it gives you material that is wilder than some of your wildest imagination could come up with.

More of 'The Bourne Identity's script was taken from the events of the Iran Contra, which my father investigated for the Senate, than what was taken from Robert Ludlum's novel.

For me, the scale of the budget is part of the creative process. 'Swingers' is the movie it is because we made it for exactly the right budget. Had it been made for a higher number, it would not have been as imaginative as we had to make it, given the budget constraints we had.

One thing about pushing yourself outside your comfort zone is that you're going to make mistakes, and you're going to fall flat on your face sometimes.

I'm very interested in politics, and I feel TV is a more political medium than film.

If you look at my movies, they're pretty densely packed, such that they not only hold up to a second viewing, they're oftentimes better the second time you watch them. So I've always thought about crafting stories that could hold up to multiple viewings, and so VR obviously fits right into that.

VR is so immersive, and when it works, it draws you into the story in a way that is truly unique and powerful.

Flying small airplanes is not like being on airlines.

It's kind of hard to work with Tom Cruise and not be aware that you're working with one of the biggest movie stars in the world.

VR should offer an experience that's more exciting than watching in 2D, and we're pretty good at 2D storytelling, so the bar's already pretty high.

In 'The Bourne Identity,' I wanted to give the audience the feeling of being in the car with Jason Bourne, not just watching him drive but be in the car with him, and 'The Wall' is the continuation of that immersive filmmaking style. Where you're trapped behind the wall with Aaron Taylor-Johnson - for better or worse, you're trapped there with him.

Casting is everything. I put a huge amount of work into casting, and consistently across my career, I am most proud of my bold choices I made in casting.

'The Wall' doesn't recount a specific soldier's experience in Iraq, but it captures the spirit of many experiences that were shared with me and with Aaron Taylor-Johnson and with John Cena.

The way I see it, the expensive people who get hired when you have money are the fancy people who tell you what you can't do.

I chose 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith' specifically 'cause I had just made 'The Bourne Identity' and made a film that glamorized being an action hero, and I wanted to make the exact opposite. I wanted to make a movie that glamorized maintaining a marriage, and that made the action hero part seem easy and made the marriage part seem hard.

What happened on 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith,' I was given a big budget and given too many choices, and I made a lot of mistakes and missteps early on until I squandered all that extra money. But then, once my back was up against the wall, I made what I consider a really good movie.

The movie I end up with is the movie I aspired to make.

I don't really analyze my process. I do know that if it's not right, I won't move on. I'm tenacious to a fault about that.

When I'm working on a film, I think about how it will play with a tiny audience of friends whose opinions I respect - basically, a 40-bloc radius from my apartment in Manhattan.

My dad couldn't connect to my wanting to be a filmmaker. He was very connected in entertainment, and through him I met Steven Spielberg and got rides on his private plane to California. I'd see Spielberg's people reading scripts. I was like, 'That's what I want to be when I grow up.'

I go into a movie sort of saying what it's not going to be.

To be a lone filmmaker thousands of miles from home with nobody believing in me, that seems romantic.

A part of me is a liberal New Yorker involved in politics and certain attitudes about movies. I kind of lost my indie credibility over 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith.' I know I haven't lost it. I just have to go make an independent movie. I just have to do it. Just for me.

I probably shouldn't treat interviews as therapy sessions, but I don't keep a diary, so these end up being my way of keeping track of where I'm at and letting it all out.

I realize I am contradictory: I have an independent filmmaker's sensibility and a Hollywood director's short-attention span.

The beating heart of your story... that's not what shows up in a trailer. The other stuff is what shows up in a trailer, because that's what gets people in to the seats, and that's how studios make their money.

It's no secret that my process is a little bit loose and can be a little bit infuriating to a studio if they don't know what they're signing up for.

I never want to repeat myself. I can't imagine anything else as upsetting as realizing I'm redoing something I did before. For some reason, when it comes to film, I'm very good at not repeating myself. Even though in the rest of my life, I'm constantly repeating my mistakes.

I make movies for me and posterity. I'm more scared of history than I am of the studio.

It turns out that it's easier to do politics in a movie. People really don't want it in their TV.

What I really found was that the one similarity between 'Covert Affairs' and 'Fair Game' is a deep love and admiration and fascination with the home life of a spy.

I populated 'The Bourne Identity' with real characters from American history, specifically characters from the Iran-Contra affair, which my father ran the investigation of. But at the heart of it was a fictional character.

I started my career wanting to make a 'James Bond' movie, and I couldn't get hired! I made 'The Bourne Identity,' and ultimately the impact of that film was that it changed the 'James Bond' franchise.

My films are very rooted in specific people's point of view. Some film-makers give a more global point of view, like God looking down at the characters.

'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' - every scene is from those characters' point of view. They're in literally every scene, very unusual in a big studio film.

Finding original source material is not easy, but when something special like 'Edge of Tomorrow' comes along, everybody recognized it. I wasn't swimming against the stream. Warner Brothers immediately supported it, Tom Cruise signed on instantly; Emily Blunt, who was our first choice, signed on immediately.

In particular, I'm drawn to the stories that have big, high concepts and real characters at their heart. And I love where those two worlds meet, and 'Edge of Tomorrow' is the perfect canvas to explore that.

I think making a great action movie is one of the hardest cinematic endeavors. By definition, smart characters avoid action. Smart people don't go down dark alleys, but if you're making an action movie and you want to have an action sequence, somehow you have to get that character into that dangerous situation.