For me, when I see movies where I kind of know who the characters are and what the situation is, I get bored. To me, it's, How do I tell a story that will keep the audience engaged? A great story does that: it's not exactly what you expect.

Every movie is a surprise. That's what is so fun about it. You can be planning a movie for years, and then you'd better be surprised every day, or it's going to be stale.

If you have that group of people who are both nice and also creative, then you have surprises like a room with monkeys in them. That has taken a very good scene and just made it a great scene. I want my movies to be visually interesting and to have a lot of energy and be colorful and full of life.

As a writer, it's fun to free yourself enough to tap into some darker elements of your personality that sometimes I don't even know exist. It doesn't feel like work.

So I like switching it up. I like that people are laughing but they don't even know if they should be laughing. I think that's interesting. I think it makes for a fun movie. And you're far more likely to be able to actually get something into someone's head if they don't quite see it coming, as opposed to delivering a very serious examination.

I'm not making a movie about the real people. I'm making a movie about what they did, and what happened to them. But I will create characters so that I can have the freedom to make them say and do what I want. The real-life journalists were fine with that.