Why no cool flying saucer for Klaatu?
SD: When I went back, I watched the original quite a few times when just starting pre-production on the movie and like I was saying earlier you need to respect the original film, and try to figure out what made it great, and what can you take from the original to a modern audience that will work for them. And watching the flying saucer from the original land in Washington D.C., I think it was the second time I was watching the film through again, what really hit me was the precedence that that set for spacecraft represented in modern cinema. Really from that point forward, spaceships all the way through 2001 and Star Wars and the Terminator films and the Matrix movies, they’ve all been represented in similar fashion, which is they’re metallic-constructed machines that are engine-driven. Those are projections of our own technology. Those are projections of our industrial-age technology, our cars, our airplanes, these things that are starting to get us in trouble in the big picture. So I
