Jeremy Piven in Smokin' Aces.

How has your storytelling changed since Narc? What were you able to apply from that film to Smokin' Aces as far as your storytelling goes?

You know what's funny? I knew they'd be radically different in terms of their style because Narc, I so wanted people to be propelled by it right with the main character, experiencing everything he was experiencing in that moment. I think with Smokin' Aces, what I did was, I allowed the persona, whomever the characters were, to influence the shooting style.

You have to have enough faith in it to go fuck it, you know what? I know that this doesn't feel like the rest of the movie, but these characters aren't like one another. Narc was much more, I think, about the immediacy of the character and this one was more about using a more visual approach to storytelling, saying less sometimes and just showing.

You have to adapt yourself to whatever the story demands.

Yeah. And I think, especially in this country, our comfort level seems to run a distinct corollary to our ability to branch it immediately and just put a label on it and go that's it. I'm not interested in doing the same shit again and again and again and again. I'm interested in doing it and doing it well and doing it in the way that I dig it and then moving, even though this genre's arguably my favorite. But at the same time, you don't grow, you don't learn anything about yourself artistically.

How would you quantify this genre? How would you characterize it?

I would say it's like a thinking man's action film. I think that if you can't go through this film without thinking or caring, you have to do both of those things to kind of really engage. I think there's a lot of movies out there where you know, I don't really give a shit about the people on screen. I wanted to create a sense of these people being real.

I don't want to be this dismissible kind of experience. I want people to leave and then think about it. I don't care if you're thinking about it afterward and you have to talk about it because you were confused. I think the failure to do that is just exploitation and who gives a shit? Then it's just porn. It's just gun porn, you know? And certainly while there is that in that movie, it's really specific to characters. It sounds trite or kind of lame, oh, a thinking man's action film, but I really want it to be... you can't check out of this one.

Smokin' Aces arrives in theaters January 26, 2007.