Most of my life, I thought that I would end up a novelist. But then, in New York City, after college, I started a company with a college friend where we made documentary video for museums. In that capacity, I shot, directed, edited and began to learn the vocabulary of film.

An X-wing fighter flies like an airplane. If you look at the physics, it's actually quite impossible.

I think my first love is film. There's something about the span of it and the completion of the experience. You sit down for two hours, in the dark, and you go somewhere else, and then you come back, having completed a journey.

I will never probably have the mathematical foundation to truly understand what string theorists are talking about, but it feels good, just for its own sake, to get as close to an understanding as you can.

For a successful writer, the secret is to have many irons in the fire. Write the next thing.

I would say that working with Ridley Scott makes the process of directing much more terrifying.

You want magic to feel real.