You grow up watching certain films or admiring certain filmmakers, and to write a love letter to one and have them validate it, it's extraordinary.

We've kind of grown up in a post-Star Wars era, and what Star Wars did to cinema, in terms of an explosion of that kind of blockbuster culture. It's thrown up a generation of geeks. With the evolution of computer games and the Internet, that's all impacted on us as a generation, and affected the creative element of that generation enormously. So whereas the different schools of filmmaking...

Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture.

I'm simply saying that our deepest thoughts, desires and preoccupations manifest themselves in art, whether we intend them to or not. That's what art is for; it's not cerebral, it's emotional.

We are never more creative than when we are at odds with the world and there is nothing so artistically destructive as comfort. Princess Leia taught me that.

I've appeared in those kind of films and have great fun doing it, and I'm always up for a challenge. I think with things like Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, those things are such an ensemble, it's not like I'm Ethan Hunt. I'm Benji. I'm the guy that does the computer business. I know my place.

It's why I get miffed at all the dashing around in recent zombie films. It completely misses the point; transforms the threat to a straightforward physical danger from the zombies themselves, rather than our own inability to avoid them and these films are about us, not them. There's far more meat on the bones of the latter, far more juicy interpretation to get our teeth into. The first zombie is by comparison thin and one dimensional and ironically, it is down to all the exercise.