Hollywood is not stupid, contrary to popular belief; it’s really a lot of intelligent people trying to figure things out.
Be really picky with your hiring, and hire the absolute best people you possibly can. People are the most important component of almost every business, and attracting the best talent possible is going to make a huge difference.
I have a tradition of working with actors, over and over again. I’ve worked with Jason Bateman, over and over again. You get to know an actor, and you get a certain trust and a comfort, and you become really good friends, and you feel like you’ve got a short-hand.
I had great luck with Tim McGraw twice in ‘Friday Night Lights’ and ‘The Kingdom.’ I love finding off-beat casting and finding someone you know in one way and you reinvent them in another way. I like doing that as a director.
I’m a huge fan of the Navy. My father was a Naval historian, and I’ve been studying Naval battles forever.
The way you set up for a sequel is by having a successful film. The focus is on making a successful film, and making a film that travels around the world, and that people enjoy and have fun with, and that people are able to escape with.
Michael Mann’s always been one of my heroes.
I’ve had great success and I’ve had catastrophic failure. It’s really how you handle the rough stuff that defines you, I think.
The first movie I literally ever made in my life was about two guys playing Stratego with each other. I had all my friends dressing up like the military characters in the game. So ‘Battleship’ is really my second board game turned movie!
The big fun in ‘Battleship’ is that there are no current battleships in the Navy today. The battleships are about 1,000 feet long and they have huge guns. They were what you saw in WWII. The last battleship that was used was the Missouri, which is what the Japanese surrendered to.
I wanted to do a naval film and I flirted with different ideas, most of which ended up being too intense. So when the idea of ‘Battleship’ was first suggested, I was instantly drawn to the challenge – could I invent a movie around the idea of five ships fighting five ships?
I don’t like alien films where you don’t get to see the aliens.
I somewhere along the way became fascinated with exploring characters who are willing to put themselves into violent situations, whether it’s football, hockey, boxing, being a cop, being a soldier. There’s not a lot of people who are willing to put themselves into those situations.
I did not want ‘Battleship’ to be perceived as an American war film. I wanted to do everything I could to make the film accessible to a global audience. It felt like bringing an alien component to the film would help take the American jingoism out of it.
I think musicians oftentimes have the right skill set to be good actors. And with Rihanna, I noticed her and knew of her obviously, and was very taken with her charisma and her confidence.
One of the things that’s fascinating about making movies is a movie when it’s done and you start showing it to people, it reveals its impact, which is often times not what you thought.
I think I’ve been fortunate enough to have a fairly long career and hopefully I’m at the middle of it now. And I think I’m starting to develop a certain amount of experience and a certain amount of wisdom about kind of what really matters and what doesn’t matter.
I tend to not have to handle things that are probably gonna end up being irrelevant, that aren’t gonna have much to do with the film. I have probably a better understanding of really what does matter, when to pick my battles and when to kind of let them go.
I’m much more collaborative than I probably was when I was first starting, much more willing to say, “I don’t know the answer to that.” I have really talented people and let them do their jobs and not try to control everything as much as I did when I was starting. I was a bit more insecure.
Every movie has its own unique series of challenges.