Santa is our culture's only mythic figure truly believed in by a large percentage of the population. It's a fact that most of the true believers are under eight years old and that's a pity.

I do love science fiction but it's not really a genre unto itself it always seems to merge with another genre. With the few movies I've done I've ended up playing with genre in some way or another so any genre that's made to mix with others is like candy to me. It allows you to use big mythic situations to talk about ordinary things.

Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.

Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful it's tough it's buried in our mythic childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure.

There's a difference between a failure and a fiasco... a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.

Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.

I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.

I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that at this moment of history feminism is humanism.