I mean, do you know what you get when you call a suicide hotline in New York city? A busy signal. Literally.

I remember seeing Stand by Me, when I was around 12, and just feeling like, "This is so refreshing to see kids swear and smoke cigarettes like my friends." It just felt much more real than the Sesame Street version of childhood that I'd been spoon-fed.

I like things that are weirdly imaginative and couldn't be real, but I also like stories that are recognizable and relatable.

Not a word of my writing has ever been changed by another person's hands, and I don't think many screenwriters can say that.

I write the book for one person — for Fiona [Staples, the artist]. I spend a lot of time just thinking how she'll react to things and manipulating her into drawing perverse, horrific things. It's a really weird job but I enjoy it.

Because it's in and about New York City, I knew 'Ex Machina' was going to have to continually mix the mundane and the fantastic.

We're not trying to be deliberately frustrating, but we are laying the tracks for a mystery, and it's one that we have all figured out. We wanted this to be kind of like the way that Cliff [Chang] and I felt about the Cold War in the '80s when we were 12.