I just think adding superheroes to something instantly makes it more interesting. I have a friend who says every movie should either be a Spider-Man movie, or at least have Spider-Man in it. I thought it was such a brilliant quote. It kind of is true, in a weird way.

The big thing is it's a domestic drama. Everything else in science fiction tends to be high-concept. Really for the last 40 years or so I think sci-fi's been a little cold and a little inhuman quite often - certainly since the 1980s - and I really wanted to do something that almost felt like a regular, real-life drama but just set it in a sci-fi setting. I think the best stuff is always like that.

I spent as much time writing proposals in '98 and '99 as I did writing scripts.

Maybe in this Star Wars world maybe subconsciously I was preparing myself. But I've just found all of my ideas I've been coming up with are big sci-fi things, and I wanted to do a big epic, a big space opera, and this is it. This is mine.

What I wanted to do was drown something enormous, like a Star Trek or Star Wars kind of space opera-type thing, but actually make it about someone who was just married to the wrong guy, and that guy just happens to be this amazing dictator, and she has to get her kids as far away as possible from this guy. So something that could almost be a TV movie, if you'd ground it and set it in Wisconsin or something like that, but to give it this enormous setting.

I don't know, maybe it's just timely, or maybe it's the fact that I live in a house with four women, but I just find my thoughts kind of skewing that direction at the moment.

The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know? I don't really think it matters. It's the same as, like, a decapitation. It's just a horrible act to show that somebody's a bad guy.