Whenever you’re making a movie, especially when you’re writing, you always have self-doubts. I did the first location shooting in Tunisia.

I was a student at Yale and wrote a paper about the computerized society that was on the horizon. ... Then I sort of let that lie. I didn’t get a particularly good grade on it, as I recall.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

[Laughs] It was hard. I was working at a biotech company in California, as you may know, and so biotech companies in the States, they want results, right? They have investors that give a lot of money, and they want results sooner than later, especially in the US. So you know it’s great that the company I worked at was willing to work on it and to persist in funding it, and all of our venture capitalists and so forth. And I think in a real way it was a testament to the power of the biotechnology industry, but also it was a lot of pressure on me to manage the programme and to keep it going, with years and years of failure basically. Yeah, so I got pretty desperate: ‘Surely we’ll do it before this one’s completed!’. [Laughs]