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Well, I'm here to, obviously, sing opera.
I'm gonna do the entire 'Ring Cycle',
by myself, and play all the parts.
I think people are gonna be really excited and happy.
'Cause they want to hear me sing - that's why they're here.
When people ask what I do for a living, I say I'm a writer.
If they press, I'll say I'm a writer/director/producer,
I work in Hollywood, blah, blah, blah, blah, movies and TV,
but I think of myself as a writer first and foremost.
That's the essence of creation for me
and the most fun I ever have.
I've always been a fantasy boy.
You know, I'm a 'Star Wars' kid,
but even before that, 'Logan's Run'.
Anything in the future excites me.
I invented my own universes from the time I was very small.
They were pretty silly, but they were cool,
and I would spend a lot of time in them.
I would spend time creating characters
and thinking of grand stories and...
..but even more than the stories,
the characters and the worlds.
And that's the place where I was the most comfortable.
A brilliant script to me is one that you care about,
one that's written from a fresh perspective,
one that's written by somebody
who actually cares about what they're writing about.
I'll even take a less than brilliant script
from someone who cares about what they're writing about
before I'll take a perfectly functional script
from somebody who's just doing a job.
But ultimately, you know, it's finding the thing
that is both surprising and inevitable.
It's finding the moment where everything turns
on something that you hadn't thought of
but that absolutely has been earned throughout the movie.
When I see that -
and the very few times when I've come up with it -
I know that OK, that's a gem.
I'll give you one example - 'The Matrix'.
You know, first of all,
great fantasy also, I think, it revolves around
something being your greatest dream and your worst nightmare.
The moment in 'The Matrix'
that for me meant
that these guys were working on a level that I hadn't achieved
is Agent Smith's speech
about, "The first Matrix was a perfect world
"where nobody suffered, where everyone was happy."
That, to me, was the most extraordinary piece of writing
because they created their third act ticking clock,
they created a new level of peril,
not because something was going to blow up the world,
not because something was terrible,
but because the bad guy was absolutely right.
He had a perspective,
he had a desperate emotional need to win
that we would never have expected to come from him,
but then, once he explained it, it was completely logical
and completely real.
That, to me, that is great writing.
The thing about directing as opposed to writing
is, obviously, you're working with the actor
and you really get to create a dialogue with that person
about the person that the two of you now are creating together.
And, you know, at first, I tended to be very strict
about my dialogue being exactly as it should.
And, you know, I still am sometimes,
but that was because my particular voice
wasn't one that most people were comfortable with,
and you could tell
which actors could sort of land it and which couldn't.
Now I get to 'The Avengers',
which is enormous -
you know, a huge movie and a huge task
with a huge cast of hugely talented people.
There are no sentences involving 'The Avengers'
that don't have the word 'huge' in them.
And, uh...and it was my wife
who, you know, took me aside and said,
"Joss, it's just another story.
"Draw the little pictures on the notecards
"just like you always have.
"You know, just forget about...
"..forget about huge, forget about everything
"except, 'Do you care?'"
And that's been the constant through all.