Joe Russo

I'm Italian, so I absorb other cultures through their food.

Anthony and I are putting together a company where we won't lose our jobs based on quarterly earnings and can afford to play a longer game. That short game is what creates a glut of mediocrity in the market because people are desperate for hits, and it puts so much pressure on executives to deliver them. We will take that pressure off the artists.

We made 'Pieces' in Cleveland with zero connections to the film business. Absolutely zero.

There's nothing I hate more than going to see a movie and thinking, 'That could have been an hour shorter.'

Being a global citizen makes you a more interesting person.

Characters have to make sacrifices. To really, really feel the true emotion and the hero's journey, they have to go through trials, and those trials could cost them something.

You look at 'Arrested Development' or 'Community,' we're constantly either deconstructing genre or tone. We like to say it's like being a mad scientist: you get to play in a laboratory and experiment with directions to take narrative in.

I've had emotional experiences in VR that I haven't been able to have in two-dimensional experiences.

Films used to be an event that required work and effort to get to a theater to see. Now, really good content is available immediately to us on many devices. At the same time, the audience's appetite for storytelling is evolving, and people want to spend time with characters for many years.

I've been fortunate enough to travel to Edinburgh a few times over the last few years, and I just loved the city. I find it one of the more beautiful cities in Europe.

Our language - the way that we deal with most actors is we don't like to get very complicated because we don't want them to think too much because we find it takes them out of the moment.

We grew up near a cinematheque in Cleveland, so we were very influenced by international cinema, the French New Wave, Italian neo-realists.