Number one rule in Hollywood is to maintain relationships with successful people, and you may find yourself involved in some very cool projects.

Movies are designed to tell us stories, engage us on an emotional level and keep our attention. This can be done with a wide range of emotional triggers - Love, adrenaline, comedy. But fear is a highly potent sensation.

It's important to continue to change and evolve in the way that the comics change and evolve.

The most challenging work is producing. The physical act of getting a production up and running is extremely taxing, and you never have any guarantee that your years of work on any given project will ever bear fruit.

Zombies - obviously they're doing it in a much more expansive way on The Walking Dead - basically, what you used to do is you put a bunch of goo on an actor and have them shamble towards you, and it's a very effective creature. It always has tremendous impact, just that feeling of death coming for you; that's universally accepted.

If you can get an audience to identify themselves with a character, they will subconsciously feel that their own lives are in danger. People tend to pay attention in situations like that. I think fear is the easiest, and most visceral, emotion to activate in an audience.

Comic books, if you're adapting a comic book - like X-Men, for example - you've got 40 years of amazing stories to dig into, things that incredible artists have been thinking about for decades.