GAVIN HOOD

Athol Fugard became famous as a playwright, so although 'Tsotsi' the book was written in the '60s, it was only published in the '80s. It was then optioned pretty much every year by producers. I think the problem was that holding onto its period setting made it very hard to get finance.

I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted 'Tsotsi,' so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.

You can sustain visual beauty and innovative visual ideas for a certain length of time, but in a two-hour experience, which is really what movies are, usually audiences - whether they know it or not - most want an emotional connection to character.

My tools, my medium, include pictures and live actors.

The first prize for any production is, if you can find a location that means you don't have to build sets, that will serve, and is not excessively expensive to hire, then it can save you a lot of money.

The reality is that art has often risen to greater heights than the people who created it. Many flawed artists have created great works of art. You have to decide if you are going to listen to Richard Wagner's music or not because he was very anti-Semitic.

When we watch stories, we learn empathy, we learn compassion, and hopefully we achieve some sort of understanding.

For me, one of the privileges of being a writer is to poke your nose around and learn about worlds you don't know.

My first experience with film was through a still camera. I would sit, very much against my will, with my father in the game reserve, watching some elephant or rhino or whatever, through a 400 millimeter lens and wait, and waiting and waiting.

Part of what's so tricky in a film that's two hours long is how many themes can you effectively explore.

The truth about filmmaking is you have all these ideas and you're trying to convince everybody that they should buy into this idea, but at two o'clock in the morning when you're all on your own you're going, 'Geez, I hope I know what I'm doing. I hope this idea is gonna work.'

3D prefers you to use wider lenses because when things are out of focus, and yet it's in 3D, it bothers you.

Most big popcorn movies are 'bad guy does something to good guy, good guy gets revenge on bad guy, sets the world right, and moves on.' And 'Ender's Game' is just not that simple, so it's an exciting challenge. It's a little terrifying, and let's see how audiences respond.

It is a myth to think that sometimes creative disagreement doesn't necessarily produce a better result.

In the early '90s, I was hired to write educational dramas about HIV and AIDS in the shantytowns. I did that for two and a half years, and then I was hired on other films. When 'Tsotsi' presented itself, I thought, 'This is not a world I grew up in, but I've spent a great deal of time writing about it and researching it in my past.'

There's always a theme I'm drawn to, that we humans are not good or bad. We're all a mixture of both. We can have great compassion or commit great violence.

'Ender's Game' has fabulous opportunities for spectacle, where appropriate, but there's also a tremendous central character. It's a balance.

For me, emotion comes first. If I have to change a scene, invent a scene, change dialogue, or put Graff by the lake in order to feel that dynamic, and the end results feels like 'Ender's Game,' then hopefully it works.

I learned a lot doing 'Wolverine,' and I was also very fortunate, in the sense that I got to do a huge number of visual effects shots.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'

I think people forget that a lot of directing is just real management of the size of a production.

When you're used to looking through a stills lens and you have to capture an emotional moment, and that picture is not moving and yet it has to have impact, I think that's the first influence on my style.

In the comic-book lore, of course, you mutate post a traumatic event. You must have the mutant gene, but if something traumatic happens to you, usually at puberty, then that mutation manifests itself.

The truth about people at every economic level of life is you get those who are kind and who are not, those who are greedy, whether they be rich or poor. That's a common thread through humanity on any street you go to.

I was drafted when I was 17, and I spent two years, and I lost a friend in war.