I think the greatest danger of the promise of space travel is that it can lead us to be cavalier about the world we live on, if we assume we can find or make more worlds. I think in our lifetimes we surely will not, probably in the lifetimes of our great-great-grand-descendants we will not.

When a new writer comes onto a project, he'll make wholesale changes just to mark the territory or for greater credit.

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

I grew up a really nerdy kid. I read science fiction and fantasy voraciously, for the first 16 years of my life. I read a lot of classic Cold War science fiction, which is much of the best science fiction, so I speak the language well, which is a commodity that's not easy to come by in Hollywood.

Now with the international space station generating a bunch of video, and Space X and other companies pursuing private space flight, I think it's on all of our radars much more than it has been since the moonshots. The science of filmmaking is making these visions possible now.

Once you've written a good script, it will get made or not get made, according to variables you cannot control, like stars getting interested, and the superstitions in Hollywood rising or falling around what is over and done with versus what's in.

The reality of space travel I think is somewhere in the middle. We will get there, it will be hard, it will take a long time, and in the end, the most extraordinary thing we will find when we get there will be ourselves.