How’s the creative scene where you live? It’s West Hollywood, so take your pick. There are rock bands up the street on Sunset Blvd., interior design houses down the street, major art galleries a couple blocks to the west, and in every apartment there’s some hopeful who’s writing a script or rehearsing for an audition or whatever. I wouldn’t call it a "scene," though. More like a free-for-all.

Due process Usually I’ll get an idea for a story and it will just sort of stay in my head for years, and I won’t know what to do with it. Then over the course of those years I will experience things, meet people, come across other ideas, and they will start to glom onto the Big Idea. The Closest Thing to Time Travel evolved the moment I heard about the competition. Before that, I figured if one ever made a movie about this, it would have to be an expensive sci-fi feature – something way beyond my means. But once I was given the constraints of using stock footage and keeping the film’s length under 60 seconds, I realized I was looking at it the wrong way: that this huge story could be poetically told with just a few images and a brief narrative. Where do you go to stimulate ideas? There’s no one place. Maybe dreamland?

Approach shot I didn’t approach the contest as, “Oh, let’s see what sort of visuals can I tweak and use to be part of something bigger.” It was very much like making a feature film, in that you are choosing footage in the same way that a director would choose different takes of a scene. For instance, how I found that guy with the wind blowing his hat off – the Getty Images library lets you watch the whole clip, so I said, “Oh, great! I can use that last little six seconds of that clip, which was terrific.”

Three films that have inspired your work? This particular movie? I’ll say After Life, Sans Soleil and the original Solaris.

Mark’s pitch: Large QuickTime Small QuickTime

Success story I thought that most of the entries for this competition would be narrative driven and I was sort of surprised that mine was one of the few that really had a story with characters. I felt, OK, if the people who wind up voting for this competition like narratives then I am in like Flynn, but then I saw the finished versions of the films. I thought, “Oh my god, these people are pros.” I’m a writer-director but I don’t really deal with a lot of effects. I just kind of put shots together to try and tell a story and to bring out emotions. I knew I succeeded on that front, but it was a crapshoot as to what the rest of the world would like.

Jolly good fellow They called me on my birthday to tell me that I had won. It was a very nice gift – I was right in the middle of opening some presents from my wife, and I said, “I don’t know if you can top this!” I know a lot of friends of mine have asked me, “Are you going to develop this short film into a feature?” No, I feel like I have told a story, I don’t need to tell it in a two-hour-long chunk, but I will be very curious to see what the repercussions are for me and for the other filmmakers after this competition. I do know there’s a lot of talent that got exposed to thousands of people.

Mark and his wife Miki at The Next Big Idea premiere in Los Angeles. 71193492, Getty Images

Telling the future It’s funny, back in 1999 I made a feature film and I was invited to speak about technology and film, and there were a lot of people talking about how the digital world was opening up so that you could have – as Francis Ford Coppola said, I think – an 8-year-old girl making the best film ever, now that she had access to the equipment. I was skeptical back then because I thought, well, the pencil had been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, but that didn’t mean that we had a surplus of great writers. I do like the fact that it’s a lot easier to see people’s work than before, especially online, because short films traditionally have had such a narrow range of exhibition. Every year I would watch the Oscars and they would talk about the short films that had been nominated, and I would think, “Where can I see these – I can’t see them anywhere, and there they are winning Oscars!” If The Next Big Idea were a plate of food? Ethiopian combo meal.