"The inception of the project for me began in 2006 or 2007, that was when I first started thinking about it – and I was struck in that moment by what felt, for a variety of reasons, felt like to be growing up in this age, to be growing up in this country, in this moment in time – there’s a line about this in the film – it feels like every day is Christmas. There’s some remarkable technology, there’s some remarkable thing. You get to a certain moment where you realize all those humans who landed on the moon did so in between Chris being born and me being born and no one had gone back since, all these Super-8 films we grew up watching of rocket launches, you get to a certain age and you realize all the speeches about going back, they’re speeches, there’s no money there, we’re not going back. And that moment, it felt like the melancholy or the sadness of that was to imagine as a species that we might have peaked, that if you charted our evolution as a species in terms of altitude, we peaked in 1973. That was kind of a sad realization. Growing up you’re promised jet packs and we got Instagram. Kind of a bum deal, I think. So I was rooted in the optimism of what is the next moment in which we start to journey again."