"A: Well I had a very clear conception of what I wanted Bruce Banner to be and part of that was Mark Ruffalo. I was like, “I want somebody who just opens himself to an audience, who can’t help it, and who just takes you along everywhere he goes.” The other was Bill Bixby. That’s something that Mark and I both talked about. I felt that the performances in the other movies were very internal. And the movies themselves led to that, because they were all about Bruce Banner. The TV show was, “I have a problem and I help other people and I live with that problem.” So that’s sort of the way I wanted to approach it and the way… Mark and I spent a lot of time at the very beginning talking about rage, how it feels, how it manifests, what causes it, what it feels like afterwards—the nuts and bolts of the emotion itself. But in terms of the character, it was very clear that we wanted to have somebody who had gotten past where he was in those movies, so that when you meet him he is somebody who has internalized what went on in those movies to the extent that he’s someone you like and are interested in. If you’ve seen those movies, this would be a natural next step. If you haven’t, you’ll get the guy. You’ll get why he’s a good guy."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Avengers_(2012_film)