I don't believe in director's cuts and I also don't really believe in deleted scenes because the movie that is in theaters, that's what the director made.

There's no question that how Johannesburg operates is what made me interested in the idea of wealth discrepancy. 'Elysium' could be a metaphor for just Jo'burg, but it's also a metaphor for the Third World and the First World. And in science fiction, separation of wealth is a really interesting idea to mess with.

If it takes several billion years to develop the building blocks which you need, like RNA and DNA, and then those can build multicellular life and then multicellular life can be honed with natural selection to a point where it becomes sentient like us, then at some point that sentient being can begin to manipulate the matter around it to build better sentient life.

My own standards that I'll hold myself to is if the product that I'm making feels honest and it feels like I didn't compromise and it just came from an honest, correct place.

I don't want to make a film that offends people, but the whole world is so politically correct - I'm not going to not do something because it may be politically incorrect. At some point, the metaphors and allegories break down. They disappear, and you just have science fiction.

When I was in my early 20s, I was quite into Japanese animation. It's like the same thing that I end up always saying which is, imagery based stuff is the thing that really gets me.

I never really think of something in terms of what not to do. It's always what's appealing or what's cool.