In the '90s there were these great end of the world movies like 'Armageddon' and 'Deep Impact'... I always liked the idea of what people on the ground are doing, not so much the people who are trying to stop the world from ending.

I liked to think I had written 'scripts' when I was in high school, but looking back at them, they were about thirty pages of wannabe-Mamet dialogue with a staple through them.

I've been obsessed with doomsday for a long time - the idea that different cultures respond to it differently, and religions will change people's outlook on it.

For me, modern technology has ruined romance and movies - nobody can run to the airplane gate anymore.

My grandfather was a police officer. He taught Dad about lie detectors and police interrogation methods, so Dad got this old World War II lie detector and used it on us regularly. He was obsessed with the truth.

In 2009, Hamas was relatively new to power. It had won elections just three years earlier and was flexing its newfound strength via a war with its old enemy, Israel, which it officially wants destroyed.

War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.

I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.