My goal is always to make something unpredictable that feels inevitable in the end. It's getting harder to do that. Audiences are so sophisticated and so smart.
When you really boil it down, what comedy does is you expect one thing, and you get a totally different thing that's humorous, and we all laugh. That's generally how, just mechanically - super-distilled - comedy works.
The great thing about writing 'Deadpool' is that he can demolish expectations and typical comic book conventions with monster truck force. There are few other characters who can transition so easily from one type of story to the next.
When we were making 'Teddy Perkins,' we were playing with a lot of horror tropes and things you might've seen in movies before, but we get the ability to subvert expectations or get a comedic element out of a horror moment.
You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.
The winners shouldn't necessarily win, and the losers shouldn't necessarily lose.
Breaking expectations, even as an audience member, is something that I have enjoyed.
My films typically veer towards the darker side, and I enjoy turning things on the audience. I really enjoy working in genre because people come into the film with certain expectations, and they know the tropes so well that when you turn on those, it can be really shocking. There's a complaisance that comes with watching those films.
I guess I blow all the stereotypes right out of the water.
I'm the only black man you ever met who couldn't dribble a basketball.
Some of those songs, you really have to bite them. You challenge yourself, you challenge the audience, you do something different. People weren't expecting it.
When you're trying to do character work that's different from what people expect from you, you're sort of in territory that is uncharted, and you don't know how it's playing all the time.
My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it.
