I think that idea of being far away from the people that you love is something that everyone can relate to.

I had a real comfort with being on a set and in particular working with special effects and because of that background, it became much easier for me to base a first time feature film on a low budget cause I was sort of already knew how to do that.

Fantasy films tend to skew towards what Tolkien fantasy was, which is that the humans, the Hobbits and the cute creatures are the good guys, and everything that's ugly are the bad guys.

I've been working my way to doing my first feature film for about ten years. So I went through the commercials route and some people come from a theatrical background and some people come from a writing background, but I directed commercials

When Peter Jackson did The Lord of the Rings trilogy with Fellowship of the Ring, not everyone had read Tolkien, and yet somehow with that scope and the spectacle of that fantasy, people were willing to give it a shot. And when they watched the first one, the characters drew them in and they started understanding the story. And then, all of a sudden, they were The Lord of the Rings fans, even if they never read Tolkien.

Sometimes there's a disjoint between what works on the page and what works with visual story telling.

I do enjoy the puzzle-solving aspect of making a movie.