I played lots of games and I was a fan of gaming, so I was always looking for new games.

The beauty of science fiction is its open canvas. You can hypothesize about any element of the world. It doesn't have to be laser battles and things exploding, you can be JG Ballad and maybe just change one little thing about the real world and that becomes science fiction.

I think that I would like to have that kind of a budget [hundreds millions dollars] and I think the reasons for it are it gives you more time and it gives you the opportunity to be more ambitious with what you want to do with the camera and also how a scene works. I wouldn't want to direct those kinds of scripts.

My biggest difference with our film and those kinds of science fiction films is that they are going from one special effect set piece to the next, what we were doing was more of a character study. And I think that is the freedom that you get by doing an Indie film. You can only really do that with a lower budget. So I understand where the conflict is between those two priorities.

I really don't see CG as a goal in its own right. I really do believe it's a tool. In the advertising industry I did a fair amount of CG, so I appreciate it for the tool that it is, and I think technologically where it's at now, you really can achieve most of your visual goals with either it or a mixture of it and practical effects.

As soon as I finished film school I was thinking about, how do I get to feature films? It took about eight years, and I'm still working. Feature films was not the end goal. Feature films was one of the stages. Getting to the point of the Coen brothers or Tarantino, where you're writing your own material and have the budget to do it properly, that's the end goal, and I'm close to that.

I was doing the promotion for Moon in LA at the same time that Tony Scott was there with [The Taking of] Pelham 123. But obviously he was so concentrating on his own film that he didn't even know I was doing a feature film.