As soon as I went to painting school in New York, I took an experimental film course, and everything clicked and came together. I realized my love of music and drama and the visual arts all came together. This happened in 1989. Since then, it's been a long road of educating myself in every possible way.

I have an aggressive streak of my own.

To me, superhero movies are like Greek myth.

Strangely, I have a huge aversion to movies that try to teach healthy people an abusive lesson about the darkness in the world.

I can't stand characters with contradictory information.

I had to adapt to other worlds, and that helped to educate me that we are all basically the same.

My fantasy is that I could wake up looking amazing, that I could be strong and stop the bully, but that everybody would love me, too. I think that's intrinsic to fantasy - fantasy is fantasy.

I think that, for whatever reason, we've gotten to a place where, particularly in Hollywood, things have to be very pat. Like 'I'm a good guy. I'm a bad guy.'

It's rare that a character film is easy to fund.

It was harder, I think, to get attention for the films that I wanted to do than I expected it to be.

I was aware that I was the first person of all time getting to direct a Wonder Woman film, and that was taken very seriously.

At the end of the day, making 'Monster' was unbelievably hard, as making any movie is. And the only thing that made it worth it is not those awards and all those kind of things that I can barely remember because I was so overwhelmed. It was really that night in the editing room, that day on set. It was those things.

Hollywood is driven by beautiful faces. Always has been.

I'm excited to see her power really soar and us have a great time having a great Wonder Woman in our world.

It's not about superheroes. This is the method of universal storytelling that all people have... To me, they're the same as the Greek myths or the Roman myths or religious figures of every religion. These are common characters that we use to express stories about being a better person or what you would do when faced with various things.

What I never want to do is start phoning it in and making things just to show that I can keep my foot in the door and do big movies.

If a film is based on a true story and you don't use anyone's name, you can do what you like.

Every villain has their belief system that makes perfect sense to them.

New kinds of heroics need to be celebrated - like love, thoughtfulness, forgiveness, diplomacy - or we're not going to get there.

When I'm on a movie, I'm unavailable every day for a year and a half. You can't do that with a little baby. Somebody might be able to do it, but not me.

I always say that 'Star Wars' had a huge effect on me, too, but what 'Star Wars' did for some people, 'Superman' did for me.

I have more information than anybody's ever had about this case. I have 7,000 letters from Aileen Wuornos and all the letters between her and her girlfriend.

My father wanted to be a hero. He went to the Air Force Academy, was valedictorian, and then he found himself strafing villagers in Vietnam in a war he didn't want to be in and didn't understand. He was extremely conflicted about the line where he went from being the good guy to possibly being the bad guy.

I grew up very inspired by 'Superman One' and by kind of the promise of the genre of what a superhero origin story can do.