When I see a kid in a movie theater texting, I think it's a failure of the movie. It's not a triumph of the Apple iPhone. It's a failure of Warner Bros. and Sony, and all that, because they haven't kept their attention and challenged them. They're smart little kids that are bored, and I wanted to challenge them.

It's a fusion of almost everything, in the way that I think society today tends to take cultural memory. Because there's an internet, it's on there forever. I think that's the way kids see the world today. They actually speak to each other using retro concepts now because the internet culture has kept that memory alive, constantly.

I will say that I'm going to take full credit for this. I knew Josh [Hutcherson] was going to be a star. One of the things you do, as a music video director, is spot talent. Th at's one of my things. I don't just do random people.

I still have every record company sending every new, hot track to me, to do music videos, so I'm chained by the foot to pop culture. I still know what kids dress like and speak like, and I still hang out with them. It's just the nature of my day job. I am a freak of nature that has to understand them.

If you really like a movie these days, you don't watch it once, especially if you're a kid, because you have a different relationship with media. You expect that to be on your hard drive, and it will look just as good, any time you watch it. It's not like VHS, where you watched it a certain amount of times and it started fading away.

The filmmaker should make it, and then the critic should interpret it, period. If the director goes in there and starts telling you exactly what to think, you have just completely slapped the audience in the face and not given them the opportunity to interest it, and that's terrible.

On a certain level, the film retains a cultural memory. It may be meaningless to some kids, but it doesn't matter. A lot of the '90s references will be meaningless, but do some of these kids really understand what they're wearing when they wear a Led Zeppelin shirt? No. But, it looks cool and it seems to have some sort of cultural cache.