Directing offers you the hope that your vision will reach the screen, unmolested and intact. Therefore, it's tantalizing to all writers.

Space and spacecraft and zero gravity and so forth are very difficult to render.

I mean that much more than wiser beings from beyond the stars bringing us enlightenment or death or salvation, we are likely to find ourselves the wisest beings on the scene.

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.

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.

I try to keep up, and the scientific perspective is always part of my creative approach.

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.