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We did exactly what everybody in the country did, watching it. You entered this state of sort of denials. You think, well, it must have been a tragic accident by an amateur pilot. And then you see the next plane coming.

I directed 24's pilot. I felt we should follow the characters around as if we were a documentary crew, using available light, hand-held cameras, split screens, sound that isn't always what it should be, to suit the reality of the premise.

You can't knock somebody for how they got into the business. I'm sure I'm gonna look back at 'Roswell' and some of my first movies and I'm gonna cringe.

Then that did very well at the box office, so before you knew it, we were in a string of feature motion pictures. Then they announced that they were going to do some spinoffs of us.

By and large, the making of motion pictures is all about, 'Let's ratchet it up.' And I always think, 'We don't need to ratchet this up.' If you do, don't call it 'Captain Phillips' or 'The Maersk Alabama.' Call it something else, and then you have carte blanche to do anything, down to sea serpents and aliens.

When you're making a pilot, what you're mostly thinking is, 'Please let this be a real job, please.'

In the Belgian air force a general supposedly saw a UFO, tracked it with his plane, photographed it with his wing cameras. And I believe it because I said to myself why would this person, not getting paid for this, do it unless it actually happened or he thought it happened.

For the last four or five years, I had been in the position where I didn't have to take a pilot. I took this one because the script and the people were terrific. It never frightened me. As we were doing the pilot, I could tell that it was working.

The pilot system in television is utterly broken. It's a huge waste of money.