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.

The '90s were a party, I mean definitely maybe not for the grunge movement, but people were partying harder in the '90s than they were in the '80s. The '90s was Ecstasy, the '80s was yuppies. There was that whole Ecstasy culture. People were having a pretty good time in the '90s.

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

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?

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.

Noah is the battle of justice versus mercy. In Genesis it says that Noah was righteous in his times. You think you sort of know what righteous means, you know, if you listen to a lot of Bob Marley. According to all the biblical scholars we talked to, righteousness is the proper balance of justice and mercy. If you think of that, as a parent, you know that if you have too much justice and you're too strict, you destroy a child. If you have too much mercy, as a parent, you destroy a child as well. A big part of this movie is Noah finding mercy for man.

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.