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.

I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking

I spent about a year and a half doing technical post work on 'The Fountain'. Although I do like the process, I think my favorite part of filmmaking is the actors.

I couldn't sleep one night and I was sitting in my office and I realized that I was an independent filmmaker.

Also expressionistic filmmaking - making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.

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.

I'd like to do a lot of different stuff. I think it's important as a creative person to keep challenging yourself and keep doing new stuff. If you end up trying to repeat yourself it's death. It just becomes boring and takes the passion out of it. You gotta find stories and characters that you really want to hang out with.