After hitting Venice, TIFF, Zurich and the Tribeca Film Festival, writer-director Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill is finally making its way into select theaters. The movie stars Ethan Hawke as Tom Egan, a former Air Force pilot who now works stateside as a drone pilot. Even though he’s able to take out targets safe and sound from a bunker just outside of Las Vegas and then head home to his wife and kids, Tom still longs to be up in the air, taking risks.

With Good Kill hitting theaters in New York and Los Angeles on May 15th and then arriving on VOD on May 22nd, I got the opportunity to sit down with Niccol to discuss his experience making the film. He ran through some of the unusual military lingo he learned, talked about the challenge of shooting the target footage and about directing his actors during the drone-operating scenes when they didn’t have many visual references. You can catch all of that and hear about Niccol’s worst job before directing in the video interview below.

Andrew Niccol:

• The worst job he had before becoming a director.
• The unusual military lingo he learned while making the movie.
• The challenge of shooting the target footage.
• Replicating a military base; directing his actors while they were piloting the drones without being able to see the visuals on the monitors in front of them.
• Why choose Peter Coyote to voice Langley?