People are fascinated, for whatever reason, by human drama, and the idea that cameras are capturing ambient stories.
I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.
I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.
I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect games, and that's all about social manipulation and observing people and alliances and relationships.
I don't like things I work on to have political didacticism - there are questions, but not messages.
We have been crafted by disaster to push out to the utmost horizon to find out what's on the other side of it. That's in our nature. What's also in our nature is a profound love and connection to our children and our communities. Those two things are very much at conflict with one another at certain moments.
Wormholes don't exist because the only way they would exist is if they were seeded with exotic material created by an intelligence far beyond our own. Something would have to make one.
'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' ends with the spaceship lands and Richard Dreyfuss' character best on, but a bunch of pilots and sailors from the 1940s get off. You kind of wanted to know what happened next.
I'm not a big believer in doing too much research - I think you can get lost in it. You can get constrained by it, which I think is a mistake. But if you've done your homework, the audience feels it.
My earliest memories are making little Super 8 films - or watching my brother make stop-motion space spectaculars.
I'm not a big believer in doing too much research - I think you can get lost in it. You can get constrained by it, which I think is a mistake. But if you've done your homework, the audience feels it.
I consider my job as a screenwriter to pack a script with possibilities and ideas - to create a feast for the filmmaker to pick from.
I grew up watching 'Magnum, P.I.' and shows like that, where you could develop a character over eight seasons, with stories along the way.
One of the things I love about working with my brother is that there's a commitment there - an unwavering commitment. From our basement in Illinois when I was three years old to Iceland on a frozen glacier with Matthew McConaughey and Matt Damon in spacesuits - there's a commitment to the pure spectacle, the pure cinema of it.