When you talk about God, the first thing that comes along is not love, it's fear. You have to fear, and be in awe. You have to be scared. Any religion, it's like first thing.

The most mysterious feminine factor, the existence that we men, we don't know. It's woman. It's feminine. That's what the sword is about. That's the symbolic meaning of the sword.

For a filmmaker, it's a rare chance to do a personal film on a big canvas.

Making this movie as a period piece about a period that was very recent in people's minds. I was in Taiwan [during the 1970s], so I hope I did all right. Otherwise, it could be the biggest embarrassment of my life. Also, the story is not linear, it's patchy, like a cubist painting, and there is always the possibility it will not hold together, it will fall apart. The tone is part satire, part serious drama, part tragedy, all mixed together, and it has to hit an emotional core. That's also very scary.

I think, if allowed, 3D is a new film language. I can have more adventure exploring a new media, that's very exciting. 2D we know most of it, things haven't changed for decades; it's the same principles, so 3D's more exciting.

Kids don't even read comic books anymore. They've got more important things to do - like video games.

So anything that's not absolutely needed, we would cut it [footage] out, which would make me very insecure; everything has to work, and it's a water movie in 3D with a kid, animals. So the more I do that, the more I'm scared of "What if it doesn't go the way we want it?" But we had to do that to meet the budget, otherwise we wouldn't even have a start-date.