I loved making 'The Hunger Games' - it was the happiest experience of my professional life. Lionsgate was supportive of me in a manner that few directors ever experience in a franchise: they empowered me to make the film I wanted to make and backed the movie in a way that requires no explanation beyond the remarkable results.

If you look at the opening of 'Private Ryan,' you are so in the point of view of those guys and there is a whole world swirling all around them. You are learning that geography as they are learning it.

You can drain the life and nuances and complexity out of things by homogenizing them to make everything harmoniously dull, flat, conflict-free, strife-free.

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.

Our educational system globally has not been historically great in reskilling for newer job roles. We need a new social contract to do that. For India, lack of an incumbent structure might be an advantage, where it can use digital education to leapfrog.

For many years, when people described how the Internet worked - whether they were talking about shopping, communicating, or starting a business there - they inevitably invoked a single metaphor. The Internet, said just about everybody, was a contemporary incarnation of the wild, wild West.

Well, another market is being created now out of Internet technology.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.