This is your last interview of the day in a very long string of them. Is it fun for you to do things like this?

Fun is the wrong word. (laughs) It's part of making a movie - you've got to get out there and help promote it, but there are elements... how this film is being presented on DVD is something I'm on a bit of a crusade about.

Tell me about that...

I'm happy to talk about that because as a consumer as well as a filmmaker, one of the things I always find a little frustrating is that when I find a movie that was shot anamorphically and it looks great in the cinema, and then I see it on my TV screen and it either looks like this pissy little letterbox thing that you can hardly see anything that's going on, or else you've panned-and-scanned it and you feel like you've missed half the information.

Do you have a widescreen television at home?

No, but I have a big set. These new television sets - they're the future. So when I filmed this movie, I had the option of doing two things. We wanted to release the picture anamorphically because that's the biggest image you can put into the cinema, but when I filmed that you can either shoot using anamorphic lenses or you can shoot using spherical lenses and expose what's called a Super 35 image. And the space on the film that's saved for the soundtrack is exposed along with the image.

Going back to a movie I made many years ago, No Way Out, John Alcott, who had worked with Stanley Kubrick, sold me on this idea that Super 35 was the way movies should be shot, because first of all, you're using spherical lenses which are of much higher quality than Anamorphic lenses, and also depth of field is better, so the apparent sharpness of the image is considerable. When you're transferring to make your films, you've got the option of doing an anamorphic, or a 1.85:1 or whatever other format you want to do

. So when I was doing this film, I thought that now DVD is very much a part of the economics of filmmaking. While I wanted to do an Anamorphic image for the cinema, I thought, "Why don't I get the monitor I'm doing my video playback on marked up with the two formats so I can compose for both formats while I'm shooting?"

So once I had that image I knew I could do a good DVD transfer from, rather than doing a letterboxed or pan-and-scan thing for the television thing, what I did was I went in there and made sure that I didn't put microphones in those areas that I wanted to use and I was able to produce an image that had all the information that the original widescreen version had, but rather than just letterboxing it, I was able to use some of the negative I'd exposed with this new composition of mine to make the DVD transfer its own special thing.

I've received a lot of email about The Recruit, because there have been a couple other films done that way - Set It Off, for example. Most of the emails I've received have been written by people who are fine with it as long as they're not losing information, but there are a few people who want to see exactly what they saw in the theater, even if it's a so-called "band-aid" transfer.

As the filmmaker, that was the creative decision I made. I wanted to be able to see the DVD as its own experience. It's not the same as going to the cinema - if you want to see the cinema version, I suggest you go to the cinema. If you're going to see it on the DVD, I want that experience to be the best it can be, because I don't believe on your home television set you're ever going to recreate the experience of going to the cinema, no matter how good your setup is.

It is of my opinion that the success of DVD has really helped to shorten theatrical-to-video release windows these days. Does it bother you as a filmmaker that DVD is getting so huge?

No, I think it's great. I'm a big fan of DVD. For many people, people with young families, people who are old, people who can't get out, with the quality that television sets can have now and surround sound systems that are available for a cheap price - many people are going to watch your film on DVD, and it's going to be a pretty darned good experience, if the filmmaker has done a good job and made that DVD something special. I spent a couple of weeks on this film supervising the transfer, and the DVD is its own thing. It is not the same as the cinema version, it's its own version, and I believe it's better than if the straight cinema version had been put to DVD.

I just think that the DVD part of it is becoming so important that - if you can, and I was able to... I have to say, I had to sell Disney on the concept of it. At first they did what they've always been doing, which is - you don't even need to be there. And I said, "This is the way I want to do it. I want to be there to supervise it." Because you're working in the digital world with high-def transfer, there is some grading and things like that that you can't do in film. I was able to do some of those sort of things, I was able to put in some little moves where I wanted to help the editing a bit - I wanted the DVD to be a whole new experience, and another reason to see the film twice, maybe.