DB: I love humor -- well, not so much for this movie. Humor is very difficult in space...No jokes.

Q: Dark Star -- DB: Well, Dark Star, yeah. We managed to get a few in, mostly through Chris Evans [Mace], but it was very, very tough. I try to put a lot of humor in my films.

It's interesting, the worse things get in cities, the tougher that cities get, the more brutal the humor is. The tougher [things] people face, the darker the sense of humor gets and I find that incredibly optimistic. I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery. People find [those] jokes objectionable but I find that a sign of life and it's something I believe in and always try to put in the films. I think the only film [of mine] that doesn't have it is The Beach which is a miserable-ist film in the end; because of the way we made it. There's an ending put on it to try to lift the spirits but it is artificial, you can see that. The film is a miserable-ist film and I'm not usually like that, at all.

I believe in a kind of optimistic, life enhancing spirit. It's easier to talk about that here because America tends to be like that as well. In Britain, people are very anti-American because of that. They think that's too easy. The spirit is still there [in Britain] but it's too easily acknowledged [in America]: the "happy ending syndrome," that kind of thing. But I personally believe in it. I have always loved playing films here. What we're talking about though is the intelligentsia. Mainstream audiences, in fact, are exactly the same in England and here.

DB: Did I?

Q: Sometimes we do twist words...

DB: (Flirtatiously) Surely you don't. What did I say?

Q: His films aren't scary...

DB: I shouldn't have, for professional reasons. (Laughs at himself) I have spoken about what's his name...Transformers...Michael Bay. I was lured into talking about him once. I don't think I have an opinion about Eli Roth, or if I do I haven't expressed it. That's as far as I think I'm going to go right now! (Laughs, slaps knee). You didn't lure me in successfully enough there!

RT: I had heard a rumor that you denied some comforts in order to make this film.

DB: We should have made the film for a lot more money but it would have been different. We would have needed a bigger name. I personally think they're all fantastic actors but they're not really matinee names or whatever you describe it as. We did it under out own terms in order to keep the structure our own.

It's very easy to turn this film into a Michael Bay- type film. All you have to do is cut back to Earth a few times and you have a disaster movie. You think about it's dead easy. Just have a couple people on the Earth related to people on the ship and you have a disaster movie. Then you have an ending with flags waving and people cheering and in fact we wanted to make the audience feel sealed into the tube with the crew. Like in Alien, there's no other scenario or other place -- you are on the ship with them all the time. There's no respite. You don't cut outside much either. When the triumph does come and they succeed at the end, it is modest, really. I think that kind of victory, when you intercede with nature, we now know there are consequences for that further down the line somewhere. So you can't get loud and brassy about the achievement.