When people think about the ark, they're always thinking about all the thousands of years of religious iconography of a ship with a bow and a deck, where Noah and the giraffes could walk around. In the actual written text it is basically described as a long, rectangular box.

Noah was this sort of patron saint in my life. When I finished Pi and I started to think about what was next, I was like, "Wow, it's interesting that no one has done a film of one of the greatest stories ever told." Even if you're not a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian, you likely have a flood story in your culture.

I hope that Requiem is better than Pi. I hope that Pi is better than my student films, and I'm hoping that I'm getting better as I get older.

The only way I know as a director is to figure out what the film is about. And out of the theme and the sense of what the film is about, all those decisions start to make sense. But to find that truth within it, you have to limit your possibilities and limit your choices. That's where this visual language grows out of.

CGI means, just to be clear, creating any type of image with a computer. Basically, starting off with nothing, or with images and manipulating them. The way we did it, everything was actual photographed images. A lot of that stuff was shot through a microscope of chemical reactions, yeast growing, lots of weird things, by Peter Parks. We put it into a computer and collaged it, manipulated it. Meaning we digitally shaped it to fit with other images. But there was no computer-generated imagery at all.

But steady-cams are very different than hand-helds, because hand-held gives you that verite feel.

I only want to work with actors that really get it and make it work. I didn't want it to be a star-driven thing anymore.