When I saw The Matrix and other movies of this type, I wished I had been given the opportunity to express myself with all this technology and do something sort of big in scale, but the right material never really came my way.

That's what the internet is: it's like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It's like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.

There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished.

My father had a Super 8 camera when I was a kid and sometimes he would use it. I did some animation with it. I did a lot of flipbooks.

It's part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.

I've always liked the idea of inventing stuff. My father told me, because I was naïve, I would think things could work and therefore do them, because I would have no doubt even though there was no solid foundation for this confidence. I don't think I would be a real inventor. But when I set out to do animation, which was my first step into film-making, I realised I could achieve this idea. I could take some elements, create a sort of clumsy invention, and make them work for the camera.

My grandfather lived across the garden from us, and in his attic he had a lot of radios, appliances and inventions that he had made over 50 years, such as a keyboard called a clavioline, which can be heard on some Beatles songs - it was popular in the 60s. So we had all that at home.