“Every great scene in the book has been reaped,” explains Don Murphy, the producer of movies like Transformers and Real Steel, who’d tried to bring John Carter to the big screen almost a decade ago, but abandoned the effort. “It’s all been done before, so you actually have to find a way to make and market it in a way that’s actually less faithful to the original material.”

It’s one of the most beautiful conceptions of my life. It was just, on a grander level, I think very important for me to have met Wes Anderson at that age. That was an age where I was really struggling to find anyone who would take me seriously and really ask me what I was feeling or thinking about who wasn’t my mother. It was tough. I wasn’t really being engaged, no one was talking to me about anything that I was interested in or wanted to learn about. So this great guy comes into my life and says, “What do you think?” I was literally shocked when he asked me what I thought about something. I was like, “Really?” He was my instructor and he’s still my mentor.

If you want a good title, you need it before you start, when you’re pumped up with hope. If you look for it afterwards, you end up thinking like a headline-writer. If Victor Hugo had waited until he’d finished Notre-Dame de Paris, he would have ended up calling it I’ve Got a Hunch.