Alien-looking Bolphunga (voiced by Roddy "Rowdy" Piper) wants to be the world's greatest warrior in the universe.

LM: The biggest challenge of doing it was just getting the time right. We have six different stories happening in this movie. Each story has its own build up and climax, and each of us as directors wanted to do embellishments and flesh out our stories, which led to scenes being so long. We ended up having to cut things way down. The biggest challenge was keeping each story small and not an epic in and of itself.

RD: Did you find that you had to tweak a lot once the pieces were put together?

LM: Not terribly. I did find that some of the smaller stories had better climactic endings than the actual main story. So we had to go in and pump up the ending of the main story.

RD: How much was based on preexisting comics and what was original content?

LM: I believe that the majority of it was based on comics. "The First Lantern" [sequence] was original. Avra character was original. He didn't originate in the comics. And the overall arching story was made up to tie everything together. The Kilowog, Mogo and Laira stories were taken from the comics.

RD: One part that I found interesting was how it highlighted the individual members' personals reasons to why they serve the team. Was how individuals come together for a common goal a theme that you wanted to explore?

LM: Yeah. I think that any time you have a character show up, you want to know what is their motivation, what is their personality, what got them where they are. This adds a whole new level of depth and appreciation for a character when you do know that. You can kind of figure out where they are coming from. So when you have that in the background, you appreciate them that much more when they're doing the group work. Whereas if you just have all these characters, and yeah there is all this cool stuff, but I don't know any of them and I don't care about any of them, it becomes a less compelling experience.

Newcomer Arisia has to step up when thrust into her first mission with the Green Lantern Corps.

LM: It's just with the whole Green Lantern universe that all the characters are so different, good or bad. Some of them are just ridiculous looking. To some degree I really appreciate that because there is no other time that you can do that. If you put a ridiculous looking thing in Superman's place people aren't going to accept it. But you go out in the Green Lantern universe and you got these [characters with] abnormal features, but he's an alien, so people accept it. A lot of the fun is figuring out how to use each of those characters' differences. If a certain character has a certain anatomy what can he do that others can't? So that's the fun of it.

RD: Yeah, I don't think that you could put a squirrel in a Batman costume.

LM: [laughs] I wish we could though.

RD: Was there any specific influences that affected how you wanted Arisia to be portrayed?