How would you spend your time if you had to live forever? It's almost a punishment.

TH: Or a blessing, if you're Eve, who takes the long view and rejoices in the small things. My favorite line in the film is one of hers, when she says, "Life is about surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship, and balancing."

JJ: Which she wrote, by the way.

Did you get dialogue input yourselves?

JJ: Oh, always. But I asked them specifically for that scene, where they have this argument or whatever, a conflict. I ask them to write their own speeches and I asked them to make them as long as they wanted and they made them quite long and then we edited them as we shot, and then I edited them down more. But that was the procedure; they wrote those things, and Tom, that's his line about the zombies being afraid of their own imaginations.

TH: That's a true statement about the world. From Adam's perspective, the reason he gets sad is because the human race is so afraid of its imagination.

JJ: There's a lot of beautiful things that they wrote, it'll be in the outtakes, where Anton wrote this part about all the bands from Detroit, from The White Stripes–Dirtbombs period, and he jumps up and is all excited about, "It's gonna come back! Just think of all those bands." But there are things in the film that he brought, of course; I don't even know what was written when, and it's not important. Because filming is about gathering the material that then you'll make a film out of.

Any lines you were especially proud of?

TH: Sometimes just saying "fuck" at the right time.

Anton, we don't know much about Ian. What did you do to figure out the character, for yourself?

Anton Yelchin: I ended up hanging out with a bunch of guys in Detroit that I met at a barbecue. I saw this band, Danny and the Darleans play, and Danny is in the Gories, and I met this one guy named Scott Dunkerly, who I'm really indebted to. Just because the things he talked about, how he felt about Detroit, how he felt about his time and place in Detroit, the fact that he was living in a city that everyone was saying was dying, and he felt that was no way to live and that he felt you can't live in a city and say it's dying, you have to bring life to it.

And it made me realize why Ian loves Adam so much, because he's his light in his life. He meets this man and he'll do anything for him, because he convinces him that there is something going on, and I felt like it was just incredible that I got to meet Scott and talk with him for a while. He put out a record — he felt all the garage rock in Detroit, people just talk about The White Stripes and that was it, it's done. So when he was in high school he collected all these bands that he knew. He gave us copies of the record, it's awesome. In his van he had these CDs, and he was lamenting the fact that no one gives a shit about CDs, he has stacks of them.

I'm indebted to him in understanding what it's like to be a young guy in the music scene in Detroit. What do you have to look forward to?

JJ: Because he met him and used his research, we brought his essence into the film, with the guy in the club who he gives the All Black records — the guy's named Scott, and that wasn't in the script, I wrote it in after he did this research. I met Scott, too, through Anton.

AY: And Scott's in the movie, he's one of the rocker kids outside.

So you shot this in Detroit — what's that like?

TH: I fell in love with the place. It's kind of America's lost soul. It's its aching heart, there's a line that isn't the movie anymore, where Adam tries to explain to Eve why he loves it so much. He says, "It's like watching time lapse photography of a flower, as it grows from a seed and bulbs and blooms and blossoms and then shrivels and fades and dies and turns to dust." I think Adam finds that really beautiful. Once upon a time it was the center of the world. Henry Ford made his first car, the Packard plant. People emigrated to Detroit for work, and that's why it became this extraordinary place of cultural diversity and that's how Motown came about. Rock, and soul, and R&B all kind of blended in, and suddenly you have this movement.

I think it's the most beautiful city, and it gave me a very different perspective, as an Englishman, of America.

What'd it make you think of America?

TH: Well it made it seem older than I had become accustomed to; it's such a young nation in the course of the history of the world, and that's its greatest strength, I think. It really feels like America has such an amazing confidence, which I've always felt is really vital and energetic. And places like Europe, where I'm from, it's older, the buildings are older, it's rain-soaked and cynical. In America it's always up and upbeat, but Detroit has a different flavor, and I loved it. I really, really loved it.