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

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

Real vectoring in space, real orbital mechanics, is very counterintuitive, very strange, and very hard to render. It's expensive, and there's a learning curve. Some of it is about raising audience literacy to the point where they understand that.

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.

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.

Everything I learn about the world, whether it's the simple arcana of how commercial products are manufactured and designed and how they reach our shelves and where the chips come from and who does the code, to more profound things like whether or not a black hole might be penetrable as a wormhole, whether or not universes might be accessible from here, whether space can be stretched and compressed to enable faster-than-light travel without violating physical law - all of those things have tremendous story potential.

The multiverse as a real physical construct within physics overlapping with a more mystical understanding of many possible worlds - the notion of there being a root down at the quantum level between intention and reality, between consciousness and existence - it's not a matter of trying to explain the mystery of magic away with a pat mechanism of a pseudoscience, it's just a matter of trying to ground it in a domain.