But what kind of an impression those early drawings must have had on a young man? And perhaps can you tell us a little bit about your father too?

Well, my father was a storyteller, but a very frustrated one.

He always wanted to be a writer.

As they say, if you're born in the years between about 1904 and 1911, which he was, and he was born in 1907, you have almost no chance of success.

And you run into the influenza epidemic of 1919, you run into the Depression, and then you run into World War II.

And the other family didn't have much money.

They were of Irish stock and, you know, and, um, so My dad ended up, after the Depression, he'd been a bouncer and tried to get money, even though he had a fantastic mind and was a really good storyteller and could quote lines of poetry after lines of poetry.

My story?

But what about that turning to your lived experience? Because you do seem to – there seems to be lots of parts of your real life that lettered throughout your work

yeah sure well I always try to find I think I aim you know I work very hard to do stories that are authentic so even though there might be something fantastical about them they're carefully structured and they anchor into a kind of gritty real world um where rubber meets the road.

And that's very important to me.

And then I find those stories out of experiences I've had.

For example, on one of the films that's on at Nova this week, The Navigator, Medieval Odyssey, I was in Germany.

I was in my 20s, and I'd just been to a medieval city, and so I was full of these medieval images.

And then, having no money, I tried to cross the road, only it was a four-way autobahn on each side, so it was eight... effectively eight roads of traffic roaring.

What were some of the lessons that you learnt from that time and did it change how you approached filmmaking and writing?