When Jon Favreau was a kid, he could see the future from his bedroom window. He grew up with his parents Madeleine and Charles in a 12th-floor apartment that overlooked Flushing Meadows in Queens, where the New York World’s Fair – a clean-lined celebration of all-American ingenuity and hope – had been held in 1964.

He was born in October 1966, almost a year to the day that the fair wound down, and remembers staring down from a pigeon’s-eye-view of this already-fading vision of progress.

Its most famous landmarks – the flying-saucer observation towers of the New York State Pavilion, the 120-foot, stainless-steel Unisphere globe – clearly made an impression: “huge wonderlands” is how the 49-year-old director describes them on the phone from Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California.

“I drive past it whenever I come in from the airport,” he continues. (The site is now a public park, with towers and Unisphere intact.) “I’ll be doing it in a couple of days. And it’ll be bittersweet.”