With a successful career in television (thirtysomething, My So Called Life) and an Academy Award under his belt (for producing Shakespeare in Love), Edward Zwick the writer/producer has dabbled in more arenas than your average filmmaker. However, when it comes to helming his own pics, Edward Zwick the director has become known more specifically for his heroes --- flawed, courageous, and almost always gunning for the Oscars. His latest film, Defiance, continues a string of weighty war dramas in the spirit of his previous Oscar pics Glory (1989), The Last Samurai (2003), and Blood Diamond (2006), in a gritty tale based on the true story of Jewish resistance fighters (Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, and Jamie Bell) in Nazi-occupied Poland during WWII.

Rotten Tomatoes caught up with Zwick to ask his Five Favorite Films, although things didn't quite go as planned; like many film nuts, he had too many favorites to choose from. "That's about the most difficult question you could ever ask a director," he told us. "I might have to do my 500 favorites!"

"I do watch It's a Wonderful Life with my children at Christmas, and I liked it long before it went into the public domain and became a cliché," Zwick shared. "I like it frankly not because of its sentimentality but because of its darkness. When The Godfather comes on, any time of the day or night, I'm lost because I'm incapable of turning it off. But, God there are Truffaut movies and Kurosawa movies, and John Ford movies and John Sturgess movies, and Fellini movies and Bunuel movies, and Ettore Scola and Howard Hawks, Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky and... just stop me."

And so, we abandoned the excruciating question and turned towards the film at hand. Along the way, we discussed how a New York Times obituary led to Zwick's 12-year journey bringing Defiance to fruition; why it was important to allow his heroes a certain degree of bloodlust and complexity; and what elements of the real-life events he had to cut out in the name of cinema. When asked his views on auteur theory -- or if there is such a thing as an Ed Zwick aesthetic -- his response revealed an interesting directorial point of view.

"I've always believed that the stories and the performances are more important than I am," said Zwick. "I think that the more invisible that my hand is, the more attention people can pay to the story and to those performances."

Read on for our full interview with Defiance writer/director Edward Zwick.

Rotten Tomatoes: Well, let's talk about Defiance. Were there any movies or directors that influenced you particularly in the making of Defiance?

Edward Zwick: I looked at Klimov's movie Come and See. It's a great film. Different, because it's very subjectively told, but it's a great movie.

RT: What lessons did you take from it?

EZ: The brutality of the moment. You know, I tend not to go look at movies before I make a movie. I'd rather not be specifically influenced. I know they're there. Let's see, but this movie...I know it was important for me that the ensemble, the community, be a character in that movie, that we have a sense of the group, as a group, in addition to just the players, and so any movie that really talked about ensembles in that particular way I know would have been influential.

RT: What is interesting about your filmography is that in later years, you've been known for your large scale war-related movies, but you started out with different sorts of projects in both television and film. Can you talk about where in your career or in your life you started being attracted to the bigger films, or these certain themes?

EZ: Well, I hate to dissuade you from this, but I'm gonna tell you a story. Do you know the poet John Donne? He did "Death Be Not Proud," he did, "No man is an island unto himself." He was a preacher, and he wrote the Holy Sonnets, and it was later discovered that there were other poems by a man named Jack Donne, they thought, who wrote this very bawdy, very sexual poetry. And then they discovered it was the same man, and they decided that Jack Donne had a religious conversion and became John Donne. And then they discovered that, in fact, he was doing all of them all along. And the truth is that I made Glory after making About Last Night..., but then went and did thirtysomething. But after thirtysomething did Legends of the Fall. But after Legends of the Fall, went back and did My So-Called Life. And after My So-Called Life then did Courage Under Fire, but then did Once and Again and The Siege. And then we did Quarterlife a couple years ago, but now I'm doing [Defiance]. I think the truth is I'm interested in both those things, have been, and will continue to be. That TV stuff has given me an opportunity to give voice to a much more nuanced appreciation of human behavior and a kind of more comedic view, and these movies are 70 ft. across and 30 ft. high, and somehow the stories feel better when they can fill the screen.