My stepmom's from Somalia, my baby sister is African American, my dad was always English, I'm a white man... You may have noticed.
I was the only kids to have Sony Umatic tapes of the old 'Star Wars.' It was such an old technology; you needed two or three tapes to show one movie, so the kids used to come over to my house, and we would watch 'Star Wars.'
I went to college and graduate school, studying philosophy. I really did think I was going to wind up being a lecturer or professor of some sort.
Sometimes you see films, not just science fiction films, where you get the sense that if the camera were to pan just to the left or the right, all of a sudden you'd be seeing light stands and crew standing around. But with 'Blade Runner,' the beauty of it is that it felt like a real, breathing city.
I don't know why, but for whatever reason, that side of life - the celebrity and the spectacle - has never interested me.
The beauty of science fiction is that it takes the audience's guard down; they're much more willing to open themselves up and allow themselves to be questioned and have their values questioned when they don't think we're talking about their world or them and what they're used to.
There's a depth to the look that you get with models that you just can't get with CGI. It's about the detail that you just wouldn't think to put in.
I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.
I'm not the guy who does slo-mo, or I'm not the guy who does splashing rain or doves flying or anything; that's not me. Every film, I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I'm working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.
Science-fiction cities in general, I think, are so hard to get right, because it's so easy to just play some cheesy music or do something that takes you right out of it, but 'Blade Runner' got it right, and I love that about the film.
I'm a natural puzzle solver.
You would never have seen me on any party scene, which is probably what made me able to disappear, in a way, because the tabloids had nothing to follow.
One of the things I think is unique and signature about Blizzard is that whenever they do their games, and with 'Warcraft' in particular, they take the things they love and put a twist on it. They showed that heroes can come from the most unexpected places, and as a player, you can play as a hero, on all sides.
J. G. Ballard is just an example of the writers I like. Philip K. Dick is obviously one of them. I'm a big fan of William Gibson as well. He started cyberpunk with 'Neuromancer.' I've come to know him a little bit over Twitter, of all places, and I was always a huge fan of his. It's very cool to know he even knows I exist.
Fantasy films tend to skew towards what Tolkien fantasy was, which is that the humans, the Hobbits, and the cute creatures are the good guys, and everything that's ugly are the bad guys.
I was a little geeky kid anyway. If I wasn't shooting little stop-animation films, then I was playing computer games or Dungeons & Dragons.
Basically, if you want to have a computer system that could pass the Turing test, it as a machine is going to have to be able to self-reference and use its own experience and the sense data that it's taking in to basically create its own understanding of the world and use that as a reference point for all new sense data that's coming in to it.
Trying to make a movie like 'Warcraft,' and trying to do it in a unique way... you get killed by a death of 1,000 cuts.
It felt very fresh to me, and it feels very contemporary - this idea that conflict's not being about good and evil and not necessarily being black and white. If you dig deep enough, you'll often find that people do things because they feel that they have to as opposed to because they are evil.
When you're in college, everything seems much more important than it really is.
