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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.