I think that people who make films and think they're changing the world are sorely mistaken. If that really is your goal, there are far better ways to do it. I'm making politically observant films for audiences.

A lot of America is kind of done. People have been making films about it for 100 years. Everything to me feels used up. But Jo-Burg feels unbelievably inspirational to me.

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.

'District 9', 'Elysium' and 'Chappie' were all born out of some visual concept first. 'Chappie' is the imagery, because I think I'm a visual person first, of this ridiculous robot character. It's much more comedy based and in an unusual setting.

You can build a brain the size of a room, theoretically. You could also build a silicone based life form and it could be sentient. There's no limit to the height that you can reach in terms of design once we figure out how to design things, theoretically.

Generally speaking, it's a very hard thing to wrap your head around that a drone operator in Nevada can be releasing munitions in the Middle East.

There's a lot of evidence in evolutionary sciences that show that altruism and acting in ways that are empathetic to others are actually beneficial on an evolutionary basis.