But I had never drawn on a tablet before. I've been doing pencil and paper and film for almost 20 years. I wanted to try something different. I wanted to teach myself some digital stuff in advance of a bigger feature project that's coming up, and I took to it really quickly.

It's one of those things that if I was smart enough to explain it in words, I wouldn't have had to make a movie "World Of Tomorrow" out of it. It's a love letter to science fiction.

It's naturally kind of humiliating and strange to have a microphone; when you're young you just make movies, you don't worry about all the peripheral stuff that comes with it.

To me, that's where memories are very interesting because what happens when we start losing memories? What happens when you can't take your memories with you? Who are we without our memories, without our past?

So much of the writing is not conscious, in the sense that it's not calculated. I remember in film school we had so many studies with big fancy words where you could dissect a movie and make charts of all of the characters' complicated inner relations and themes and what does this mean? And it's overwhelming as a student. It's great for a student, but as a writer, it's paralyzing.

It's great for me to hear those different reactions because when I travel with a movie like this [World of Tommorow], it's very similar. You'll hear a line in one city get a big laugh, and then in another city, the same line kind of gets a gasp, and that's wonderful.

After working so long on something like this, it's great to go out and meet people and see the reactions and remind yourself that, oh, yeah,, I wasn't just working in a cave by myself for no reason...