- The truth is it's all of our taste in cinema combined. I mean, it's the update in film. As a filmmaker, you want to show the world what you're interested in, what you like. We were just lucky that this story allowed us to do that because it is, there is multiple things going on, and we could introduce multiple genres and tones into the one film and get away with it. We made a move that we wanna see. That's really what it came down to.

- It's a wish fulfillment movie at its heart that is, sort of reaches back into these nostalgic films in the '80s that we grew up with and about a young outsider that might find something

- Change his world.

- Changes his whole world and everything he knows, and leads him towards a new sort of position or new destiny of some kind. We love those kinds of movies, things like The Last Starfighter and Flight of the Navigator and movies like that. I'm sure we all enjoyed back in the day. So we wanted to bring that to the movie, but then we also knew that this image of a young African-American boy holding a weapon is controversial, and it should start conversation. It should make you feel a certain way about it. So it was a lot of timely things that sort of creeped into making the film, and we love that about making movies.

- The guys were up front about it in that very first conversation, that they wanted to tell a story that could exist hopefully with or without, you know, the space weapon. You know, if it could stand on its own legs, that we had something special. It's a way to make both of those stories, the sci-fi story and the family story better.

- Even if it's not onscreen, we've talked a lot about the mythology behind the science fiction elements in this film, and it all holds water. It's exciting stuff and things we'd love to explore, but again, we'll see if audiences are ready for an original sci-fi movie that isn't based on anything that they know. If they embrace it, then yeah, it might have unlocked a door.

- Practical is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot, right, on DVDs and behind the scenes.

- [Offscreen Voice] The Star Wars extra footage thing.

- Exactly, and look, I get a lot of it. I've also seen some very realistic CG that you couldn't be doing practically.

- Planet of the Apes.

- We support that too. But on this, we wanted to make an anti-green screen film, and so there isn't any green screen in this movie, and one effect that we're really proud of is the laser orb that the cleaners have, and so they pull out this prop, they throw it, it floats, and it spits out this laser, and that laser was shot practically with a concept laser that we got in Toronto that you have at a Jennifer Lopez concert. It's about this big. We attach it to a technocrane, and we had it practically on set for all shots that you see the laser. And then we painted it out. We replaced it with the orb, and if you really look at what this thing does throughout the movie, and there's two scenes at least where this thing is kicking around.

- Specifically, the second one where it spins around within the strip club and that green laser is bouncing off glass objects, refracting through surfaces, I mean--

- There's color bounce--

- You can't fake that.

- Yeah, I mean, we had digital effects guys look at us going, "Thank you "that you guys did that for real," and we just had to do this very little thing that enhanced it and took it to another place. That type of filmmaking, it's really fun because it's happening on the day in front of you. We're all geeking out over it because it looks cool.

- [Jonathan] And we also have a 14-year-old lead that needs for things to feel real because this is his first movie and we're putting a lot of pressure on his shoulders.

- Right.

- He's the main character, and any chance that we could take to make him believe the moment, we did, whether that's the prop that he's holding in his hand or other visuals that he sees on the screen.