When 'Iron Man' came out, I said, 'Oh - they are trying to have some fun.' It was a relief because every superhero movie had become so damn serious. Some people love that, but for me, it's a weird thing to watch. A man with a cape can have fun, but I won't listen to a lecture from him.

Sometimes those big bloated superhero movies take themselves too seriously compared to the material they were based on. Am I going to listen to psychoanalysis from someone with a mask?

I am a big fan of movies that don't take themselves too seriously. You know you won't change the world, but have fun. Movies like 'Butch Cassidy' I enjoyed tremendously, but it didn't alter my opinion of the world.

Real acting is about giving people an insight into a person, letting the audience in.

I consider myself more a European director who is from Iceland than an Icelandic director.

In Iceland, the weather is the biggest character you deal with every day. There's nothing more relevant in your life than what kind of weather it is.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

I have no problems with remakes, and I think it's interesting. I mean, coming from the theater, we've been remaking 'Hamlet' for a hundred years, so it's no problem to me at all. A good story can be told in many different ways in different places; I just think it's interesting.

When I write and develop things myself, I might work for a while on a script from a book, and then I go back and read the book and go back into it to see if I lost something: is there something there?

I used to sail a lot in all kinds of weather, competing on small sailboats in the ocean. And I travel a lot in Iceland on horses every summer, through the wild areas where there's no inhabitants and there are volcanoes.