When you don't have time to do your job, that's a good indication you're playing the wrong game.

I'm a huge fan of the Rod Serling sci-fi, where they could take the most odd and enormous ideas but ground them in something very human.

Matthew Vaughn phoned me up and he said, "Hey, listen, the movie has just done gangbusters. We've got to do the second one." And I was like, "Matthew, I have no second book. Dave and I haven't done it," and he's like, "You're kidding!" He said, "This movie's just made $420 million!" I was like, "...We've got nothing." So the amazing thing was, because we own the rights, we still get paid and everything, which is fantastic.

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

Their argument, and I think it's a correct one, is that they'll make more money from the trades and the hardcovers if nobody messes with the creative team.

I've done so many superhero comics, and I've actually just been really excited about sci-fi, and Chrononauts and Starlight were both sci-fi, which I had a great time doing.

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.