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The first film that I can remember seeing where, like, I just couldn't stop watching it - and it didn't necessarily make me want to be a director because I was so young, but it made me know that that's what I wanted to be doing - was 'Alien.' And I saw that when I was probably just over 10 years old.

My earliest memories are making little Super 8 films - or watching my brother make stop-motion space spectaculars.

I don't think there have been many alien movies where the actors have actually seen the aliens.

When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.

I actually went to film school and was making experimental films for a short time, so it wasn't such a leap.

And then we watched an amazing number of movies from the late '60s and '70s, which is my favorite time, and we studied their camera movements, their stocks, the way they lit stuff, the colors they used.

I did important films when I was very young.

Stephen Hawking's been watching too many Hollywood movies. I think the only kind aliens in Hollywood are the ones created by Steven Spielberg - 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'E.T.,' for example. All other aliens are trying to suck our brains out.

In my early days, I didn't know what a good film or a bad film was, and I was trying to make some money. As it happens I was lucky. I made some good films.

I didn't come from a background of films. I didn't even really ever watch films. The fact is, my parents weren't into that stuff, and neither was I.