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.

I think that 'Elysium' the movie is unrealistic, with the space station and everything. I think 'Elysium' the metaphor is completely realistic: it's exactly where we're going.

I had artists that refused to work on Chappie if they were working on a design that actually said Denel on the side of the thing. But anyway, it's the blurring of fiction and reality that was appealing and I certainly did not want them to be in the movie and not be themselves.

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.

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.

The fact that natural selection and evolution crafted essentially carbon and water into a mechanism that can think and be conscious means there's nothing in physics that says you cannot do that to a greater degree.

I've learned more, and I understand the process a bit better now. I can try to see how long I want to take in each aspect of the filmmaking process, and then arrive at around the two-year end mark.