We talked right before you shot “Memory.” How’d the finished film compare to what you imagined before shooting it?

You never quite know how the film’s going to turn out. I mean, I do a lot of preparation on movies. I do a lot of preparation, and I go through it very carefully. I have an idea of what I want and the way I want to turn out and so forth. Well, hopefully you get some surprises, it turns out a little better than you hoped. Certainly not worse. I always start a movie like I’ve never directed a movie before, so it’s always that fear effect that you’re going to screw up, basically.

That approach makes sense since you tackle several different genres, too.

Yeah, I know. Well, it’s fear really. Fear drives you, doesn’t it? That you’re going to screw up and that you hope you’re going to be able to get through to the end of the schedule without screwing up.

Even though you’ve made a variety of movies, do you see a unifying vision in your filmography?

A lot of them are thrillers. I mean, you look at “Edge of Darkness,” it’s a thriller, you can look at “The Foreigner,” that was a thriller. I did “The Protégé,” again a thriller — a genre thriller, if you see what I mean, a female assassin story. “Memory” is a thriller, but this is different in the sense [that], I think, it’s more complex, and the characters have a little more depth, perhaps, and [it’s] more interesting because of the nature of the story.

Early on, my first film was a film called “Criminal Law” with Gary Oldman and Kevin Bacon. Again, I love thrillers. Years ago I saw “The Manchurian Candidate,” the John Frankenheimer version, which was tremendous, ad that really put me on the road to doing thrillers. The one film after “Criminal Law” I did was a film called “Defenseless,” which was not a good film. I did a film for HBO called “Cast a Deadly Spell”…

Great fun.

It’s sort of weird. I remember being offered it and saying, “I can’t do this. This is not me. It’s completely nuts, this movie, there’s no way I can do this.” My wife said, “Well, you should get out and do it. That’s all the reasons you should do it, because you think you can’t do it.”

What were your fears about “Memory”?

Well, the Alzheimer’s aspect of it — can we get that right, for example. We plotted it out very carefully. We start out where he simply forgets where he puts the key to his car. I mean, we all do that. But then, of course, it progressively gets worse. So by the end of it, he’s very advanced with Alzheimer’s. Now we’ve only got a film that lasts 110 minutes, so in real life, of course, that could be years.

Also, it’s a complex plot. There are different strands to it. There’s the whole Guy Pearce side of things. There’s the Hugo side of things, the Mexican side of things, right? There’s corruption within the DA. It had all the different strands of the story that were quite complex. Making the story clear was a challenge.

What work did that require?

I do a lot of work on the script in terms of construction and so forth for the film to make sense. I have a pretty good story sense. I just know if you don’t, you end up in a preview and on the cards it says, “What the hell was all that about?” I mean, Jesus, you know what I mean? I want to avoid that, so I do a lot of work to try and make sure the narrative makes sense and that people will understand the movie.