Derrickson: When I went back, I watched the original quite a few times when just starting preproduction 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 precedents 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 loved the idea of trying to develop an alien technology that came from a completely different trajectory altogether and came from a completely different tradition. This was something I discussed with the art department and everybody, and the idea that this was a species that had a technology that was essentially more ecologically and biologically based. That's why the ship looks the way it does.

Keanu, is there something about the sci-fi genre that keeps pulling you back? Or is a film like this like doing any other movie?

Reeves: Well, I love the genre, and I approach it like any other film. I guess that's the short answer. Science fiction provides great storytelling opportunities, and in the past I've just been fortunate to be part of good stories in science fiction genre films. Jon, can you talk about how you came on board—did it happen after the first season of Mad Men? What have the last couple of years been like for you?

Hamm: I did come on after we'd wrapped the first season of Mad Men in September.

Derrickson: But only a few episodes had gone on the air.

Hamm: Yeah, they hadn't really all aired.

Derrickson: If there had been, like, five more episodes, we wouldn't have been able to afford him [laughter]. That's true.

Hamm: I came on relatively late to the project. It was already going, and I came into the scene where I basically explain what's about to happen. It's sort of a three-page-long monologue about astronomy and trajectories and things. ... I basically got off a plane, got fitted and thrown onto the set, which was a little bit nerve-wracking. But just the opportunity to be involved in something like this is amazing for me. I'm still relatively new to all of this. That gets into the next part of the question.

The last couple of years have been bizarre, to say the least. It's still kind of a weird thing to wake up and come to this and sit next to these people and talk about things like this. So it's new and weird and terrifying and all of that stuff, but still very exciting and an opportunity to do something that I wanted to do since I was a little kid. To get to do something like this and work with not just Jennifer, Keanu and Scott, but, I think, David Tattersall, the director of photography, who shot Star Wars [Episodes I-III]. I mean, what? Really? That's cool, I guess, that's pretty nice. So it's fun, which is, I think, the overriding feeling of what this career should be at the end of the day, is an opportunity to have fun and do cool stuff, and this pretty cool. ...How did the politics of the last eight years impact the making of this movie?

Derrickson: I think that when we were making the movie, I knew what the release date was going to be. I knew that it was going to be released in December of 2008. At that time, I didn't know who the candidates would be, let alone the president. But I think that I felt the way most Americans felt, which was that we had slipped off track in a number of ways and, like I said, gotten ourselves into some real jams, serious ones.

I had, I think, also the same feeling that the majority of Americans had, which was not one of cynical pessimism. I just really didn't feel that way about it. I felt good about the fact that it felt like the collective community of America that I lived in was recognizing its mistakes. That was really encouraging to see and to be a part of. I even looked back at the election and the way it was conducted, and I feel like there was something uncynical about what's gone on in America in the last year.

I knew that this movie would be coming out when that president, whoever it was going to be, was going to be elected and before he would have taken office. I just had faith and hope that it would be a time of optimism and it would be a time of expectation that there would be some significant changes in this country. And that's not a partisan statement. That's just a statement of fact, that we all know we made some mistakes. We've made mistakes. We've made some misjudgments, and everyone, I think, is ready to correct them. Admit it and correct them and represent ourselves better, not just domestically but as part of the global community.

I love the idea of making a big entertaining popcorn movie that had some of that uncynical point of view, admission of serious mistakes and serious problems that we have and recognizing those things. That's, again, where I was trying to respect the original film, because for a Cold War film, it's surprisingly introspective. It's surprisingly turning the lens back on America, as opposed to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where it's about the Red Scare. So that was, for me, very much in mind. ...Could there be a sequel?

Derrickson: Yeah, that's right. Six Months After the Night Following the Day That the Earth Stood Still. If you're asking about a sequel, I haven't heard any discussion about that. Would you want to?

Derrickson: Probably not.Was the chalkboard scene with John Cleese designed to be musical?

Reeves: That was intentional. We were thinking about it as a kind of dance and conversation.

Derrickson: It's a real math equation about a real significant high-physics theory about the universe, and we tried to be truthful to the scientific aspects. I just did an interview with Discover, and the interviewer was really surprised at little things in the movie, but that being the biggest one. We had an astrophysicist who worked with Keanu and John. I still remember watching them for quite a long time. I don't remember where we were in the production, but for quite a long time in a room working out the back-and-forth of that, and then we added material to make it longer at one point ... just to get that kind of flow and rhythm to it. I didn't have much to do with that. I'm just remembering, because it was really Keanu and the math guy, the theoretical physicist, and John Cleese. The three of them just kind of figured that out, and I saw it and thought it was fantastic.How did you come up with the new look for Gort, and why use nanotechnology?

Derrickson: Yeah, the nanotechnology element was in the script, which I thought was interesting, so that was already there when I got involved with the project. But there was no real description of him in the screenplay. We started down the wrong path, honestly, because, as I said, I looked at the original and tried to figure out what things can I really bring to it, and Gort, what things can I bring from the original to the modern movie that audiences who don't know this film will still appreciate? I just couldn't quite make sense of why this thing would be in human form. It certainly can't look like this tin robot from the original. So we spent a lot of time designing [a] fantastic alien monster creature [and] things that got increasingly ridiculous. I mean, it got to the point where I remember sitting in a room with these two pieces of artwork that were like the current versions and just saying, "This looks like something that should be in a museum of modern art or in a park as a piece of modern art." I didn't even know what I was looking at.

And Jeff Okun, our visual-effects supervisor—I'll never forget it—he was just standing in the doorway, and this is like after three or four months of doing this, and he just was standing in the doorway, said, "Why aren't we just making it look like Gort?" And I remember it was one of those moments, I just looked at him, and I was like, "Oh, God." I just didn't even want to acknowledge how dumb I felt when he said that. It was so obvious. It was like, "OK, yeah, you're right. Let's get rid of all of these." So we needed to make it look and feel like the original somehow, but it needs to have the impact and the scale and the magnitude that a modern audience will find satisfying. So we basically tried to find the best blend of that, how we could most keep it looking like the original without it falling short of what modern audience standards are for a sci-fi robot thingie. It was really that. ...

The nanotechnology aspect of it, I did think it was interesting. That is an interesting aspect to science fiction storytelling and certainly [a] major part of science fiction literature right now. I like the idea of him having that, [to] be playing a role in [that] and also helping to justify why Gort is in human form. It's not that he was built that way. He chose that shape to present himself. So that started to make rational sense to me also.