There are an enormous amount of techniques I wanted to beta test in television. You can't take those risks on a $100 million movie.
In tough times, we all hope for knights in shining armor, or the cavalry, to show up and effect change.
We're so specialized now in our entertainment. It's nice to do a show where you're really circling back to this idea of, 'Couldn't there be a show the whole family can watch together?'
I've always lived by this philosophy, when it comes to conspiracies, never to attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence.
I haven't had the egomaniac star yet in any of my films. It's always been a pleasure.
'Independence Day,' ever since we did it, there's been enormous pressure to follow it up.
We did the original 'Stargate' as an independent movie. It was a surprise success. Shortly before the movie came out, the financiers who were frightened the movie might not do well sold the film to MGM. When the film came out, it was a hit and spawned TV shows.
I know I screwed up my 'Godzilla.'
I would love it if the whole 'Godzilla' franchise was revitalized for a new generation.
I always wish I had another shot at it. But, listen, 'Godzilla' is something that I grew up loving. We worked hard to go make one. We kind of blew it. I think everyone gets one.
When you look at our Godzilla, you won't feel any nostalgia.
Everybody already knows what Godzilla is.
Spielberg is our hero. For him to make a nod to 'Godzilla' just before we make our movie is like getting the king to acknowledge you at dinner.
When you convince sci-fi fans you've done something cool, you get them in huge numbers.
Many years ago, I was actually hired to write the sequel to 'Independence Day.' And I wrote a sequel. And they paid me a boatload of money to go write this thing. And after I wrote it, I read it and I gave them back the money and I said, 'Look, this is an okay movie I just wrote. But it's not worthy of the sequel to 'Independence Day.'
As for 'Independence Day,' we never intended to do any films in that series beyond the first one.
The scale of 'Independence Day' is much more than 'Stargate.'
It was somewhere in doing the last season of 'Leverage' that John Rogers and I became confident that we had developed an all-new production technique where we could put more on the screen with very little money. So we started to get more comfortable with the idea of trying to tackle 'The Librarians.'
We used to call them the storm of the century but now we're seeing what happens if we don't act fast enough - and real human beings are suffering because of that.
I don't think of myself as a former actor. I think of myself as a reformed actor.
