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.

I frequently run into this, where I genuinely feel like - and this is not just my head cold talking right now - I often, and this is going to sound weird, but I often feel like the guy who makes these movies is smarter than me. Smarter than the guy on the phone right now.

Most people's personalities and roles are locked by the time they're nine or 10. I think there's something to that.

Fighting a cold, but I'm powering through. As they say, there's nothing better for a cold than doing interviews all day.

Traditionally, digital projects, when you project them, they get really washed out. It's complicated stuff with gamma, but basically your blacks get very milky and the colors get very weak, and we made so many different versions of it to just pump more color into it, so it would look just as good in the theater as it does on your screen at home. And color was my constant whine. It needed to be very oversaturated.

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.

Maybe the most annoying questions is: "Where do you see yourself in so many years?" It's a terrifying answer no matter how you think of it.