Growing up the son of a director has made me very aware of the various turns that a directing career can take. Sometimes your films turn out exactly as you want. Sometimes they don't. I spent a lot of my childhood on sets. I think as a joke, my father gave me a line of dialogue in each of his films during the worst moments of my puberty.

Growing up sucks, doesn't it? I understand why people wouldn't want to get old - but it'd be one thing if we became a culture obsessed with eating right, doing yoga, going to therapy and becoming at one with ourselves. That be great. But we don't do that. We seem to be obsessed with all the wrong ways to stay young.

Alien' asked ground-breaking questions about eco-politics and female empowerment. 'The Matrix' delved deeper into the concept of perception versus reality than perhaps any other film I know. But for some reason, we tend not to remember the significance of their writing.

I'm not going to have a perfect career. It's better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.

Why doesn't Apple stop for a year and make medical devices? When people talk about technology, that's where I start to get a little hot under the collar because I know that it's the key to solving some of the world's biggest problems. Having a faster, thinner telephone is not one of the world's biggest problems.

I spent a lot of time wondering about the future. I am curious: when we have AI, and it becomes more mainstream, how is that going to affect the way we communicate with each other?

I think to do a proper independent movie, in my experience, it takes 22 or 23 days to shoot. That was 'Party Girl' or 'House of Yes.' But now with the digital camera, the budgets have gotten smaller, and the days have gotten shorter.

When you have a young man, I mean, questioning the power in place for love of his country, not to say 'stop' but to say 'be careful about the abuse of technology,' I think it deserves to be promoted.