I've certainly never used my father's name as a way of getting a meeting. And fortunately, I've never needed to.

I don't know if subconsciously there was some reaction going on, if there was something in me that didn't want to learn an instrument - because I couldn't have been that incompetent!

I'm a bit of a geek, actually. So I always wanted my first film to be science fiction.

When Peter Jackson made the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, I remember there was a concern that people who didn't read Tolkien wouldn't go see the first one. But the films were so good in their own right that the audience grew beyond the readership of the book.

I'm a gamer at heart and always have been. I'm also a filmmaker.

After 'The Fellowship of the Ring,' the films that followed it, instead of having their own unique aesthetic, they all wanted to be 'Lord of the Rings' as opposed to learning from 'Lord of the Rings.'

I was such a big 'Dirty Dozen,' 'Where Eagles Dare,' 'A Bridge Too Far' - all those kinds of movies I loved.

I don't know why, but for whatever reason, that side of life - the celebrity and the spectacle - has never interested me.

I love the 'what if' nature of sci-fi.

Even before 'Moon,' I did a short film called 'Whistle,' and it had a lot of the things that I thought I would need to be able to do on a feature film: I shot on location, there was special FX work, there was stunt work, we used squibs, I shot on 35 mm film.

Motion capture has become very specialized but also still just a tool of filmmaking.

I think, visually, 'Moon' probably owes more to the first half of 'Alien' and 'Outland' than it does to '2001.' The character of Gerty is obviously a straight rip-and-riff on HAL.

Treat the audience with respect and maturity, and have a certain faith in them to catch up.

I think if you're young and you're being compared with a successful family member, it's really hard to maintain any sense of self-worth and credibility.

I love incredibly imaginative, speculative sci-fi.

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.'

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.

People don't talk about how hard it is to make a movie. Nobody does. Ever.

At the end of the day, the less money you have, the easier it is to make a movie.

My characters in my movies are all flawed. You'll probably never see Tom Hanks in a Doug Liman film. He plays, you know, very earnest and unflawed.

My family went to the Hamptons, so I understand what happens when a slice of perfect utopia gets overdeveloped, when one way of living is replaced by another.

Normally in spy movies, the person that the hero deals with is at the centre of power, surrounded by video screens, and they're old and grizzled. I'm no stranger to that dynamic.

My films have been successful, and therefore, the process has accommodated me. When the studio said 'no,' I did it anyhow. Now they don't say no to me.

It causes havoc on set anytime a director wants to go backward rather than forward.