You do look at a lot of movies and many characters seem to be interchangeable.

I think we tried to make a film [Moon] that was about human beings as opposed to going from one special effects set piece to the next one, which is what a lot of science fiction films these days do.

You do look at a lot of movies and many characters seem to be interchangeable.

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.

I'm a cruel man to myself.

Life and career kind of catches up with you.

When I said that something was going to cost a certain amount of money, I actually knew what I was talking about. The biggest problem that we were having on the financing front was people with lots of money saying "you need more money to make this film [Moon]," and us saying "no this is the first feature film we want to do it at a budget where we sort of prove ourselves at the starting end of making feature films; we can do this for $5 million." That is where the convincing part between me and Stuart came, we had to convince people with money that we could do it for that budget.