The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee.

In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.

There's a lot of fiction from that period that we're nostalgic for.

I realized that for fantasy and science fiction, especially from my youth, white was the default. Luke Skywalker was in the lead, or even if you were a hobbit, you're going to be white. That was an extremely old-fashioned, obviously really narrow-minded way to look at things.

If a good editor will let me tell my story with the right artist, I'm happy.

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.

The longer I've been writing scripts, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning.