And there was an image that we really liked of her floating down past her house. We recognize her house but she's now floating underwater and is passing from the world of consciousness to the world of dream state. So we had these notions and ideas and the guys started drawing up this art and we literally, as they produced pieces that we liked, started to narrow the choices down. One piece of art might have an element that we really liked combined with another and it was a question of putting a lot of this together. And some artists felt it more than others, and Michael ended up being a terrifically wonderful surrealist artist, which is interesting for a guy with a history of matte painting where you are actually creating total reality. I'm sure he was unleashing all sorts of creative things inside himself.

BD: In terms of the CG imagery, what was most challenging?

PJ: The art was definitely used as the template for the CG imagery. But the things that were difficult sort of required the world to behave in a way that was not following the laws of physics. One idea that I had that came from a piece of art was Susie running across the cornfield towards the Gazebo and she doesn't even quite understand that she's dead at this stage of the story, but she had her first date with Ray [Reece Ritchie] and they were going to meet at the Gazebo on Saturday night. And she sees this Gazebo in the field and she's running towards it and the field has corn and one of the very familiar dream images is, as you start running towards something, your feet get glued down or you start running through tree trunk syrup -- we've all had those dreams where we can't reach where we want to. So, we all had the idea of this wheat field becoming a sea of water, so the wheat starts to undulate like following the waves of the ocean and it splashes stuff that come out of the wheat so the tops of the wheat start throwing drops of water off, and she slowly starts sinking in it and then the water takes over from the wheat and she sinks further. So that stuff was difficult because you're applying the physics of oceans and water to a field of wheat and I think technically that presented the biggest challenge because of the way we were mixing up physics in a way that's not really natural.

BD: And what about heaven?

PJ: There's only one moment in the film where we get a glimpse of heaven. We experimented for a long time with how much of it we should show because I didn't really want to see heaven and wanted to keep that intangible and to the audiences' imagination. So it did take us a while -- which was more of an artistic challenge than a technical one -- to figure out how much we should show and, if you don't show much, how do people actually realize what they're seeing?

BD: It forced you to be iconic.

PJ: The iconic helped us in a way, as you say, because that's where the cliché of heaven allowed us to use reasonably simple imagery and communicate that this was heaven without needing to show anything complicated. I didn't want anyone to actually, really understand what was in there. That was something for the characters to find out, not for the audience.

BD: What's it like being on the cutting edge of technological change?