'Flash Forward' was one of the big heartbreaks of my career. It was just this very frustrating experience. If we'd been allowed to tell the story we wanted to tell, I don't know that it would've been more successful or not. There's no way to know.
The thing about 'Batman Begins' is that he's a character that people thought they knew a lot about, and yet you're able to identify the spirit in his life where even in the comic books it's not explored that much.
There's been a long lineage of a stranger in a strange land, whether it's 'E.T.,' 'Starman,' or other movies about trying to connect with humanity; it struck me that's what a Superman story really is.
What Christopher Nolan and I have done with 'Superman' is try to bring the same naturalistic approach that we adopted for the 'Batman' trilogy. We always had a naturalistic approach; we want our stories to be rooted in reality, like they could happen in the same world we live in.
What I really like to do is write 'genre' stories without a cartoonish element. I did the same with 'Da Vinci's Demons,' and I'll do the same with 'Man of Steel.'
It took a while for the first 'Blade' to get made, and Marvel decided they liked the Whistler character so much, when Blade guest starred on the 'Spider-Man' cartoon, they put Whistler on the cartoon, and the movie hadn't come out yet.
I love casting against type and doing things you wouldn't expect, because I think you get more interesting performances that way. Hollywood loves to pigeonhole people, and there's nothing an actor loves more than to do something different.
I relate to the feeling that Da Vinci was often plagued by the idea that what he did wasn't good enough, that he was his harshest critic. He'd sometimes destroy what he was working on.
I think there's really only been one successful video game adaptation, and that was probably 'Tomb Raider.' Whether or not you thought it was a good movie, it was successful financially.
It's ironic: In movies, the most successful films of all time have been sci-fi or fantasy. By far. But a lot of people won't even read science fiction books.
People have a very proprietary relationship with Superman. It's important to respect the iconography and the canon, but at the same time, you have to tell a story. Once you land on who you think the character is and what his conflicts are, you have to let that lead you.
There's a theory in gameplay, particularly in first person shooters, that sometimes you don't want to have that much of a character because then it destroys the experience of the player being that character.
When Superman was originally created, by Siegel and Shuster, they were two Jewish immigrants that were desperately trying to assimilate into America. They were having a hard time because they were Jewish. They wanted to get in to mainstream publishing but they couldn't. That's why they, and a lot of Jewish guys, went into comic books.
You have to decide what kind of story you're going to tell. For instance I would argue a movie like 'Toy Story 3,' which isn't realistic at all, is really emotional and involving. It just depends. I played this game called 'Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP' for iPad that is totally old school 8-bit, which I found very moving.
I think Wonder Woman is a very difficult character to crack. More difficult than Superman, who is also more difficult than Batman. Also, a lot of people in Hollywood believe that it's hard to do a big action movie with a female lead. I happen to disagree with that.
