Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.

Casting ethnic characters is a very hard thing to do, but it's important. It's also interesting.

Turning 30 was when my parents both got cancer and were fighting it and beat it, but their mortality started to get to me. Everything wasn't as hunky-dory like it was.

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.

Artist and illustrator R. Crumb did a whole illustration of Genesis. And he didn't go away from the text; he was totally truthful. Reading through that, I was like, "Oh, wow, it's a comic-book version of the Bible." There's a lot of heavy-duty stuff that goes on that doesn't make it into Sunday school.

People have been screaming about the end of times forever, it's always the end of times. But there's just so much evidence that the world is changing so radically right now. How much can the world take?

The whole visual language of the movie is developed way before we get to set. Especially when you're doing visual effects and you don't have a lot of money to mess around, which we didn't, you have to really preplan everything. Pretty much every shot in the film was figured out months before we got to set.