#or when people try to personify things that cannot be contained (the universe)

[softcryz]

Soft warmup where I tried to draw it's old design but got sidetracked drawing the much more fun incomprehensible true design things. I don't know. One day I'll be able to give it the justice it deserves

[rueitae]

Welcome to the Neighborhood

Allura is not dead and the story isn’t over. Fight me.

I needed to time heal after season 8. Please take this post canon fic and do with it what you will. 2200 words. Thanks you @sp4c3-0ddity for the usual. <3

Read on Ao3

~~~~~

She sees them all, every possibility in every reality, every moment that makes one branch from the other. Billions of new realities are born every tick as decisions are made in everyday life.

A yalmore turns right instead of left. Her nana chooses a different dress for her to wear on her tenth birthday. A man picks up a piece of trash instead of leaving it on the beach. Each one creates their own strand of reality.

It doesn’t hurt, all this information, at least not her head.

She aches as Earth is destroyed before Voltron is reformed, the Paladins only children. Her heart is sick watching as Lotor grows up in cold loneliness time and time again.

She reaches out to change it, to prevent her loved ones from pain. She finds herself unable to touch or affect anything.

So she observes; all at once she experiences joy for her friends and mourns for what could have been and what has been lost. She sees millions of realities where she has a family of her own, sometimes with Lance but not always. The number of children vary and if her oldest is a girl or a boy. In others she remains single but alive.

Only in the one she left behind does she become what she is.

Which is… what, exactly?

Allura isn’t sure, but it becomes harder to see the different realities through watery eyes. She sees her happy ending unfairly play over and over in different ways. It does nothing to soothe the longing in her heart.

Over time she learns each reality like the back of her hand and begins to foresee the divergent realities. Soon, she cannot tell what is the past and what is the future.

What’s the point of having all this power - of having to leave her loved ones - if she cannot do good?

Physical contact, the first since she sacrificed herself, surprises her and interrupts her concentration.

“Careful, sweetheart. Too much work this quickly will make you go mad.”

Allura turns around in the white void to greet her guest.

Of all the people she expects to visit her in the afterlife, Bob is not one of them.

Allura believes herself a reasonable person, and the last time she saw Bob he’d held her and the other Paladins captive on his game show.

She summons her bayard with a growl and wraps her whip around the surprised host, jerking him and his floating platform towards her.

“What do you want?” she seethes in his face. “Is this your doing?”

“Hey! I’m not the one who decided to go out in a blaze of glory!” he protests, raising his bound hands as high as he can. “That was all you.”

“‘Great judge of heroes’, my quiznak!” Fury fills her heart remembering Coran’s explanation - oh Coran she misses him so much already - of the supposed judge of those who would do great things. “Did you know all of this would happen? Did you know Honerva would try to destroy everything?”

Allura hasn’t seen Honerva since parting with the Paladins. To think all of this, her fate included, culminated from a desire for family.

But blood does not a family make. Allura takes that to heart above all else. Her Paladins are alive and thriving, so she can endure whatever this is for their sakes.

“Hey, I keep tabs on potential heroes! That’s my job! It’s your job to watch different realities, Ms. Lion Goddess.”

Allura lets his words sink in, a pit falling in her stomach. “What… did you call me?”

“Lion Goddess,” Bob says dryly. “Welcome to the neighborhood, by the way. Norlax and I got you a fruit basket. Which I’d love to give to you, if you’d be so kind as to let me go.”

“Can’t you just...poof out, or something?”

“In my realm? Sure. Not in your place though.”

Allura lets the blue bayard revert to its base form. The flash of anger is nearly gone, replaced with a weight in her heart she isn’t sure she wants.

Lion Goddess is what the Arusians first called her, a title she rejected. Even now she does not wish for it.

She now knows this isn’t death.

Bob hovers closer, wrapping a friendly arm around her shoulders and dropping a basket of Altean fruit in her unprepared hands.

“Thank you… Bob. It’s lovely.” Though the words fit the situation, they taste strange as they leave her mouth. The mundane exchange feels like it should take place anywhere other than in this void.

“You’ll get used to it,” Bob assures her as if reading her stunned thoughts. “Take some time to spruce up the place. You’re only limited by your imagination, your realm, your powers, your fashion. And you, kid, have plenty of it, what with bringing back Altea and managing infinite realities and all.” He rolls his eyes. “Just wait until you start getting heroes petitioning your help for their cause. There’s only one you for all realities after all.”

Everything still feels so fresh, the battle and her actions that followed. The looks on the faces of her Paladins - her family by choice - as they said goodbye brought fresh pain to her heart. So perhaps that is why she asks, “Is that why you have guests, Bob? Do you miss your loved ones too?”

Allura doesn’t know why she expects anything different when he shrugs off the personal question with a smirk. “The circumstances are a bit different, but our goals of keeping order in the universe are the same.”

“So you are lonely,” she presses. She wishes to be anywhere else - with either her father and all her loved ones who waited for her, or with those she left behind.

Bob shrugs. “It comes with the job, but there’s no rule against visitors as you can see from yours truly,” he says with a proper bow. ”Is that why you gave him a part of yourself? Do you want them to find you?”

Allura looks at her hands, pink energy glowing around them in anticipation of her will. Lance doesn’t seem to mind the marks, a constant reminder of her sacrifice even more than the statue they built. Does it make him lonely every time he saw his reflection? “I wanted to give him something, anything, after he gave me so much. Can I - is there a way for me to go home?”

“Not without tearing the fabric of space and time,” Bob says, and Allura’s hope sinks. “But hey, what else is new for the Paladins of Voltron?”

Allura doesn’t want that, nor does she want more painful goodbyes.

Only bounded by her imagination, Bob says. Perhaps she can tell them she is alright, that she is going to watch over them; ask if they are truly happy…

She finds them asleep at night in her mind’s eye, in the reality she had left. The small act of Lance, Hunk, and Pidge wearing their Altean pajamas warms her heart. Surely of all realities, here she should be able to do something. She reaches out to the life force she left, eager to leave a message with Lance.

Instead her will finds a stronger and older link. Platt dreams of sampling Hunk’s cooking, Chuchule of sunbathing, and Chulatt of exploring Kosmo’s thick fur.

Allura clasps her hands together, hopeful. “Friends, please, can you hear me?”

Plachu’s whiskers tremble and he wakes, head turning as if searching for her voice.

The others rouse slowly while they chatter, wondering if they all dreamt of their tall friend.

Success! But now...what can she say? Can she just...bring them here?

Black lightning strikes in the distance and demands her attention. Allura severs her connection with the mice in time to see Bob jump in response to the flash.

“What… why is that here?” he shrieks in an understanding that chills Allura’s spine, because she too recognizes it.

The rift entity, the thing that started Zarkon and Honerva towards their path of destruction. The thing she used to bolster her own powers…

And never removed from herself.

“It came with me,” she says in growing dread. Here where she had access to every reality...

The frequency of the flashes increases, getting closer by the tick. The edges of the white void darken as it approaches.

She turns to an awestruck Bob. “How do I stop it? I cannot let it get to the other realities!”

“I’m neutrality personified,” Bob explains as they back away from the black void. “It’s a creature born of the rift between realities; you need the same energy to oppose it.”

Power trembles at her fingertips, begging to be released. Allura grits her teeth. If this is her role now, to protect all realities and keep her family from having to fight any further, then she will do it.

Bob yelps and hovers behind her as the black lightning surges towards them, the last remaining bastion of light. Allura meets it head on, dropping Bob’s gift as the darkness halts at her outstretched arms. It twists around her body, searching for an entry point.

You used us once, let us in again, it taunts.

“Never again,” she spits, and her quintessence overwhelms it.

Not even a yalmore is capable of such otherworldly screeches. The entity from the rift between realities shrinks to its smallest form, resting in the palm of her hand and emanating a soft pink glow.

Because Allura wills it to be contained.

But Honerva proved that containing it is not a permanent solution.

Allura parts the white void as if it were a curtain. It opens to the quintessence field, the place from which it originated, where she allows the entity to drift under her magical supervision. She closes the rift with a wave of her hand.

It will never corrupt again.

Bob breathes a deep sigh of relief and slumps in his chair. “That was a close one. The realities without Voltron are a lot less traumatic.”

Allura tries to imagine what life would be like if the comet had never landed on Daibazzal. She only has to look in on the right reality and the peace she could have had pains her. But… then she never meets her Paladins. In its future, Keith is never born, and Shiro passes away far earlier than is right.

She closes her mind to that reality. She doesn’t want a world where neither of them is there.

To think that small thing was responsible for the corruption of Honerva and entrapped the other Alteans.

She gasps in horror. “I never removed it from the others.” She frantically searches for the malignant entities and visions of the affected Alteans appear in the void above her. Allura tenses. There are five of them still out there. “I need to get them back into the quintessence field as soon as possible!”

“You won’t be able to trap them if they’re outside your realm,” Bob says. “I couldn’t do a thing to you Paladins until you entered my nebula. You may be able to see realities, but you can’t change them - that would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?”

“Then Voltron’s work is not yet complete,” she says sadly. Her friends can’t rest, not when Voltron is the only other force that can oppose these creatures.

“That thing getting into any of our realms is a bad idea,” Bob tells her, “but I don’t have to tell you what could happen if it does.”

“The corruption of all realities,” she agrees. Guilt fills her gut. She sacrificed herself to restore all realities, yet she delivered a malignant entity right where it could do the most harm. But… “If I could contain this one, I should be able to contain the other five before they find a way here on their own. It isn’t safe to leave them unaccounted for in the universe. The Paladins will need to form Voltron to bring them to me.”

Bob grins knowingly, snapping his fingers. “See, you knew the whole time.” He laces both sets of hands together and crosses a leg over his knee. “So, how are you going to bring the Paladins here?”

“Not while you are visiting,” she says sternly. “I will not have you taking them in for your quiznaking game show again.”

Bob sighs dramatically. “Too bad. I was looking forward to seeing a rematch of Shiro versus the Snick.”

She needs to contact Lance and the mice, but first, she needs to get the Paladin’s attention. They also need a way to find her. Lance is good with directions, but his methods would fail in deep space.

Her mouth tugs up slightly, but she’s unable to smile fully with longing overtaking her. There is no greater bond in the universe than between Lion and Paladin, the same bond that allowed Zarkon to chase them across galaxies.

And she was bonded to all of the Lions.

Twin pedestals rise on either side of her. She places a palm on each one, her power flowing through this realm and into the greater universe.

She reaches the Blue Lion first, and her message is instantly understood. The Lions roar in acknowledgement. After the Paladins witness the send off, Allura bids the Lions to join her.

Now she waits for the Paladins to follow, looking forward to a very happy reunion.

[topicprinter]

My co-founder wrote a really great post on the telltale signs of someone who's great at sales. A lot has already been written here, but he takes his personal experience as a sales leader in the trenches and spins out some unique insights.Some of the quotes are hard learned lessons that come straight from customers mouths, such as this one:Respond to my questions with certainty in-the-moment and you’re 10x more likely to earn my business. Let those concerns go unanswered by an hour and you can cut that probability in half… by two hours half it again… by one day half it again…and so on. It shows me that you don’t know the answers, which challenges your believability… or shows me that you don’t care enough to address them.I think Reddit might enjoy this. You can read the post on medium here: https://medium.com/@dooly/selling-trust-6b2c712cde8d , or if you'd like, enjoy it just below the break.Let me know what you think!Selling TRUSTDreamforce — Marc Benioff’s crown jewel in his ever growing SaaS empire and the epicentre of all things related to Salesforce. 140,000+ people looking for the next big thing, the deal(s) that will make their year, or, let’s face it, a chance to get your company to pay for you to go see a “free” Green Day/Red Hot Chilli Peppers/U2 concert! Dreamforce also happens to be an epicentre for all things connected to sales. I was at Dreamforce a couple of years ago as a guest speaker on a panel where the discussion quickly pivoted down a very interesting path.The original topic was relationship selling and how to leverage the network of your peers during the sales process. The plethora of platforms out there right now that help you figure out who you’re talking to, how to get to them, who in your company can point you there, etc. made this a pretty obvious conversation. It’s clearly far easier to talk to a prospect that you’ve been given a warm introduction to or at least a prospect that you know a thing or two about from their Twitter history. In today’s selling arena, let’s call this table stakes (or steaks as I used to think it was spelled — a far more delicious connotation).Back to the pivot in the conversation… Once we established that you can leverage your network to find out pretty much anything about anyone, right down to their opinions on politics and their favourite soup, we got into something more to the point.We can give them all the tools in the world, but what are the telltale signs that a salesperson is simply ‘good’ at what they do? How do I identify the rock stars and how do I best support them?Now, for a bit of colour on this, I’ve hired a fair few sales people over the years…fired a few too. You get to know what to look for and, if you’re reasonably adept (or honest) at introspection, you can probably figure out what makes you decent at what you do as well. For myself, I used to think that I was lucky — that luck literally followed me around from deal to deal. To an extent, that’s true, but it doesn’t explain repeated success. Luck may get you your start, or the occasional “bluebird” deal, but it doesn’t allow your sales trajectory to ascend to great heights.The reality is that there isn’t one right answer to what makes someone great at sales, but you will always find a few common threads between them. We’ve all heard the expression, “people buy from people they like.” To an extent, that’s correct. But the core compound to likability that catalyzes every good relationship is TRUST.Aside…my eldest son is in Grade 7 right now and my school days are a few years back in the rearview mirror, so I’m being re-educated on everything from Algebra to Science right now. The genesis for this post is actually much to his credit as he asked me to help him understand the distinction between an element and a compound. After explaining the difference between salt (NaCl) and sodium (Na), he was well on his way to figuring it out!Inspiration!In the context of selling, T-R-U-S-T is a compound made up of 5 key elements, talent, resilience, understanding, stories, and timing. You build TRUST with your prospects and clients by possessing parts of each.TalentThrough my years in selling I have become more and more convinced that the best sales people simply cannot be manufactured without having certain raw skills, talent being the foremost on the list. Now, talent is a pretty vague descriptor, so let’s break it down a bit further. Talent goes beyond the ability to craft a beautiful powerpoint deck or a proposal that sells itself. What talent really implies (at least in this instance) is an aptitude for being relatable to your prospect. I once explained it as “being a better chameleon.” My hope isn’t to encourage sales people to become fake or untrue to their own values — it doesn’t quite work like that. As sales people, though, you do need to be adaptable to the person that’s in front of you. After all, you’re not asking them to change who they are in order to do business with you, you’re asking them to have faith in you as a person. Personability, ‘the gift of the gab’, being able to read the room, the ability to connect with another person and making it seem easy — talent in this context is the first stage of building TRUST. My wife often says that this is how I duped her into marriage — proof that it works!Resilience…and while your job is to make it feel easy for your customer, know that it isn’t always going to be the case. Nobody on this planet is universally liked (cute babies excluded) and connecting with some people can take time. A brow-beaten, over-solicited buyer likely has a lot more on their mind than whether or not your solution is going to solve their problems. The best sales people are also the ones that can handle rejection delivered a million different ways. We’ve all heard the expression, “thick skinned,” and the best sales people personify this.Of course, resilience and preparation go hand-in-hand. Think about what you can do to handle the barrage of objections a customer might put before you. How can you minimize the time between a knock-down punch and your ability to get right back up and keep throwing? Tenacious resolve — that unfettered desire to win — isn’t genetic, but we all know people that are better at it than others. If you’ve ever done any work in New York, you’ll have a far greater appreciation than most on the impact of resilience in creating TRUST!UnderstandingWhile this somewhat ties in to the idea of being relatable, understanding is unique enough to stand on its own. Relatability is how you convey your understanding of a prospect, but the art of understanding requires something different, “empathy.” A huge part of sales is human psychology — which really boils down to the ability to put yourself in the shoes of the person across from you, process what they’re going through and then go about helping them navigate their way to a better place.When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems. — Stephen CoveyEveryone in sales should have heard the expression, “two ears, one mouth” by now! Interestingly, top performers seem to have this skill innately engrained in their systems — the ability to listen more than they speak. It allows them to seem as though they can see around corners because the prospect, more often than not, will unknowingly paint the blueprint for the rep on how to close the deal if you just let them talk! Listen with your eyes as well as your ears and you’ll understand the whole story even better — you can learn a ton from body language.Last point on understanding…demonstrating appreciation of your clients’ needs isn’t enough — that merely shows that you’ve done your homework (your clients expect that much of you). Empathy is the ability to understand the impact of those needs, the personal stake someone has in a decision, and the payload associated with your time. It’s something I call Outside-In selling and have dedicated a whole other blog post to (stay tuned). Suffice it to say that without having the ability to see and feel what your prospect is going through, the third element of TRUST will be out of reach and your believability will suffer.Stories…and when they resist believing you, tell it through the lens of someone else! One of the biggest, most recurrent themes I’ve heard from one sales rep to another….heck, I’d take that further and say from one sales organization to another, is the gulf between what people are selling and the corporate treasure troves containing the anecdotal evidence, the wins, the ROI contributions, and the overall personal/business impacts of what is being sold.At my previous company I felt this problem profoundly. When I moved my young family from Australia to the UK to run EMEA sales, I found myself in a situation where we had reps all across Europe selling into local markets. With different buying cultures, different competitors, etc. we were faced with the real challenge of creating meaningful collaboration between the different regions. The consistent ask from reps, whether they were in Cologne, Milan, London or Paris was for the relevant stories and anecdotal facts that they could leverage from one another’s existing customers. We created a Google sheet of stories, asked the customer success teams to contribute alongside the reps and did a company offsite to try to proliferate those stories. The challenge we faced was that the stories were super personal and very situational, so it was hard to get a high degree of recall without being in-the-moment. If we’d cracked the code on how to share these stories, the result on sales cycles would have been profound!Prospects may believe what you’re telling them about the unmet pains and needs your solution will provide, but without a shadow of a doubt they will believe the stories you tell them of other customers in similar situations. It not only helps bring your product to life in a real example, but it helps disarm a prospect from thinking that they’re your first guinea pig in a market. I’ve too often seen the Powerpoint deck with the “customer logos” page, propping you up artificially in a sales process….if you’re going to put logos in your deck, you’d better know a story or two from each of those companies. You will be asked!TimingMost in sales will be coached on deal cadence — the ability to read the tea leaves in a deal and submit a realistic forecast for a month/quarter/year (the longer the timeline the more we all expect it to become nebulous, of course). What about customer cadence? Who is taught well on how to set the pace of a conversation, when to interject, how to build waves of follow-ups to bring an opportunity to a successful conclusion? How do you develop a good sense of timing?We’ve already established the “two ears, one mouth” rule which should hint at your conversational timing. Often, though, we scramble to keep up with a highly educated, well-researched buyer when it comes to answering their questions, responding to their needs, doubling down on their pains and eliminating objections from a deal, whether they be related to competition, legal, product or other.I remember a customer once telling me the law of diminishing returns on his likelihood to buy from vendors:Respond to my questions with certainty in-the-moment and you’re 10x more likely to earn my business. Let those concerns go unanswered by an hour and you can cut that probability in half… by two hours half it again… by one day half it again…and so on. It shows me that you don’t know the answers, which challenges your believability… or shows me that you don’t care enough to address them.Now, that’s not a universal law, but I think you get the point — you create a perception through your ability to respond. It’s much better to be prepared with the right information in the right moment than it is to say “I don’t know.” If you really don’t know, commit to a timeline to get the answer and stick to it — always better to come back with a good answer than to make up a bad one!When you’ve been on the sales roller coaster enough times, you get a sense of when key moments are coming and hopefully can become a bit more rhythmic with the twists, turns and undulations of your deal flow. It does take awhile to get there! That said, the sooner you can figure out your sense of timing on a few different levels, the better.The TRUST EquationSo what does all of this mean? Every sales person is going to be measurably different in their degrees of Talent, Resilience, Understanding, Story Telling and Timing Sense. This is by no means a prescriptive formula with exact ratios of each element! Some of these skills can be taught better than others and some really do need to be innate. Results aside, the best measure of any of these skills is to ask customers, friends and peers how a person measures up in their TRUST equation. What are their shortcomings? Why? I can say that in my experience, finding a natural is the exception to the rule and when you do find them….hold on to them!Sometimes you don’t know a gifted salesperson until you’ve already signed the contract! Not because they did anything wrong, but because you didn’t feel like you were being sold to at all.At Dooly, we’ve built our platform with an appreciation for how all of what we’ve said above impacts your relationship with your customers (and ultimately, your ability to close business!). We recognize that the smarter you are, the more in tune with your buyer you can be. There is no greater contributor to your deal movement than being in harmony with your customer from your offering through to your interactions. Our goal is to bring you the tools that will help you earn the respect of your customers in the moments when they are most needed. With this, we’ll help you earn their TRUST.Happy selling!

[aion-rsa]

Director Scott Derrickson Hopes to Helm More Doctor Strange Films

Already an acknowledged master of tautly constructed and tightly budgeted horror films like “Sinister” and “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” filmmaker Scott Derrickson found himself entering a whole new dimension when he was tapped to helm Marvel Comics’ fabled Master of the Mystic Arts’ first foray onto the big screen.

But like Stephen Strange, Derrickson’s skills proved equal to the task: “Doctor Strange,” as personified by actor Benedict Cumberbatch, proved a fresh new addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, garnering widespread critical acclaim and generating colossal box office grosses.

RELATED: Doctor Strange Concept Art Reveals a Different Version of Dormammu

As the film approaches its digital debut on Feb. 14 and its subsequent bow on Blu-Ray and DVD on Feb.28, Derrickson joined CBR for a look back at the influences and inspirations that fueled his vision for the character’s epic origin, the elements he held back for further exploration in future films, and the change in philosophical mindset he adopted to take on his largest-scale filmmaking challenge to date.

CBR: Once audiences got a chance to see “Doctor Strange,” what was your takeaway from their reaction? For so long you’re working in a bit of a void, and I’m curious about what was intriguing to you in terms of what the fans had to say once they got a chance to see the movie?

Scott Derrickson: That’s a pretty incisive question. I don’t know that I really have an answer for you, because I kind of put the blinders on, once I saw that the reviews were all positive, I didn’t read them. I just saw it was 90-something percent on Rotten Tomatoes and the box office was huge. At that point, I just kind of turned it off and tried to not pay too much attention to it for my own, I think, mental and emotional health.

So I don’t know: I can only assume, and based on some of the Twitter feedback, that people got an experience that went beyond their expectations, and that was always the idea. It was to create characters that they cared about, that had ideas that had some weight and some significance, and that would be a visceral experience beyond what they’d experienced before in a movie. It seems, based on what little feedback I have paid attention to, it seems like that happened.

Whenever the Blu-ray comes out, it���s a chance to pull back the curtain a little bit on the magic tricks of filmmaking. So what are you excited for the fans of the film to be able to get to see about your creative process, or in the scenes that didn’t quite make the final cut? What are you happy to be able to show them right now?

Certainly, it’s going to be an interesting exploration. I don’t know what all is on the DVD, and I haven’t seen the extras and that sort of thing. But I’m sure there’s going to be plenty in there about the visual effects, about the nature of those sequences. There really was a lot of innovation, a lot of bold attempts to do something new. So seeing how a lot of that was done, that’ll be interesting for sure.

I think in the end people will, if the extras and the behind the scenes stuff are thorough enough, see how it doesn’t just take a village, it takes a small city of people to make a movie like this, and the collaborative process of it, and the genuine enthusiasm that everybody brought into the creative process is what made the movie good. Everybody kind of caught the vision and caught the fire, and constantly contributed originality and quality to the movie in a way that went beyond anything I’ve experienced for sure.

One of the things I really enjoy about the movie is that it is a self-contained story, but you also allowed yourself some delayed gratification for the road ahead, not using Mordo as the primary villain here for example, or not really yet exploring the full status quo of Stephen Strange as the Sorcerer Supreme. What was fun about knowing that Doctor Strange’s story was likely going to go on, and figuring out what part of that story you were going to tell in this single movie?

I had learned a lot watching comic book movies over the years. There’s very few exceptions to the rule that you cannot create an extraordinary character and an extraordinary villain that are fully formed and fully fleshed out in the same movie. There’s just not enough real estate. The Green Goblin was a good villain in the first “Spider-Man,” but still not nearly as fleshed out as Doc Ock. Same is true with Ra’s al Ghul and the Joker in the “Batman” franchise.

So I was aware of that, and I knew that the emphasis needed to be on telling Strange’s story. It was a story about one man’s journey. It was ultimately a mind trip action movie about one man overcoming himself.

I felt it would be a disservice to try to give Mordo his early villainous presence like the comics did, and that if he was going to be an interesting three-dimensional villain, you had to get to know who he was before that first. I always felt satisfied with that decision. I love the moral complexities that he wrestles with in his moral structure and rigidity, which ultimately becomes his undoing, that he has no moral flexibility, and that sort of causes him to snap. I thought all that was really interesting.

The main emphasis was always keeping our eyes on the character of Strange. I know that that’s where the audience was going to want to be. There, and in the craziness of the dimensional worlds that the movie was opening up the MCU.

How much ownership do you hope to maintain, either over the character Doctor Strange specifically and what happens next with him, or even just the entire magical side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Is it one? Is it both? Are you still deciding?

I hope to do a sequel for it, because I think that character I love and understand. The magical, mystical nature of his multiverse is also something that I understand have ideas how to expand.

In terms of the character in the MCU and being present in other movies, I have no say, no interest in having any say. I trust those filmmakers implicitly to make good use of him. The more they use him, the better in my opinion.

I ran into your screenwriter Jon Spaihts at a premiere a few weeks back. He was telling me some of the other characters in the “Doctor Strange” canon that intrigued him, like Nightmare and Clea. What’s got you excited, and what characters that you did address are you also interested in expanding the story? Obviously Mordo is one, but who else in the “Doctor Strange” mythology is enticing to you, now that you’ve got a bigger playing field?

I can’t answer that question. I can’t answer that question at this time. I definitely have my opinions. I have my strong opinions. I don’t want to voice them at this time. It’s premature. Sorry.

That’s okay. In your visual inspiration, we see a lot of, obviously, Steve Ditko on the screen. I’m curious about the other sources that sparked your imagination, both from comics, maybe other “Doctor Strange” artists after Ditko, and outside of comics – I see a little Escher in there. Where did the other visual inspirations come from?

The inspirations that came from later comics, it was “The Oath” and “Into Shamballa.” Those two graphic novels were probably the most influential, both in story for “The Oath,” and in visuals “Into Shamballa.”

I think that in terms of other source material, yeah, definitely Escher. The whole idea of the New York mirror dimension chase, the goal and ambition of that was, what would a chase scene be like if it was inside an M.C. Escher painting? That was kind of our target idea on that. Surrealist art, Dali being an obvious inspiration. A lot of contemporary surrealist photography, which is really bold and exploratory, and does things with tactile, realistic, modern imagery, and turning them into surrealistic images.

In terms of cinema, I just looked at a lot of movies that were bold, visceral experiences for me that were not rooted in physical destruction like most tentpole movies. Jodorowsky’s movies, his films “Holy Mountain” and “El Topo.” “Enter the Void” I looked at, just for the bold psychedelia of it. Obviously, “Inception” was a starting point for us with the mirror dimension chase. I think we’re standing on the shoulders of that movie, but not really taking anything from it. To me, it was the tip of a very interesting visual effects iceberg, that movie, and I was trying to plunge deep into the iceberg and do something far more surreal, and psychedelic, and crazy.

I listened to almost nothing but late 60s psychedelic rock the entire time I worked on “Doctor Strange.” I think that when you fill your head with that music every day, and I would even listen to it on set. It does put a zap on your brain and get your mind into some pretty exploratory spaces. So those are the hard influences, I think.

You were convinced early on about how right for the part Benedict was. How did he surprise you in the making of it? What things did he bring that you weren’t anticipating that you were pleased with?

I wasn’t anticipating how good and un-troublesome his American accent would be. He was coming straight off of “Hamlet.” He was doing “Hamlet” I think two or three nights before starting to shoot “Doctor Strange.” He just walked on and did a perfect American accent. He had a vocal coach who was there, whose ear was very attuned to those things, but she very rarely had to correct him on anything. He just came in and nailed that.

I think the two biggest surprises were really good ones. One of them was his work ethic, and how prepared he was, how disciplined he was all the way through the last takes of the day. That was a pleasant surprise, because you just don’t really ever know with actors if they’re going to be complainers or be demanding, and he just wasn’t.

But I think the biggest, most pleasant surprise was his physical agility – and I had an instinct this would be the case, but boy, did he prove it to be true beyond my hope or expectation. He’s an action star. He really knows how to use his own body. He does so well. Those fight scenes are him. Of course, he had a stunt double, but he did everything he could possibly do without risking getting himself hurt.

And a lot of times, I would have to force him off the set. I’d be like, “You’re not doing that shot. You’re not going to do it. Sorry, you’re not going to do it.” Because I would be afraid that he’d get hurt. He was game for doing pretty much everything. There’s a lot of wire work, a lot of fights. He got punched and kicked and gouged plenty, because that’s what happens when you do those scenes. He was good at it. He’s an action star. And he hadn’t done that before. What other better surprise could there be than him being actually really good at it?

What was the big takeaway from this experience for you as a filmmaker? Walking out of it, thinking, “Okay, this is a big lesson that I learned that I’m going to carry forward – not just necessarily to another “Doctor Strange” movie, but to every movie I make?”

I knew that making a movie this size, the short answer is I learned to be more fluid. My notebook that was my notes, every director kind of carries their little black notebook to write their own notes in, write their own thoughts in as they’re working, and the one that I carried had Bruce Lee’s Taoist symbol that a man should be water on it. Because I knew that in order to do this well, I had to be water. I had to be very fluid, and sort of flow with the changes that would inevitably come, and with a willingness to radically do things, or change things, or cut things, as I was working, and to be constantly reshaping the movie to be the best thing that it could be.

You don’t make low budget films that way. You can’t. “Sinister” only worked as a film because I was extraordinarily rigid and disciplined, and shot exactly only what I needed to shoot, because I had to make that movie in 22 days. With this one, it was the flexibility. I learned to be really flexible.

I also learned the value of working with creative people who care mostly about the quality of the movie, and that’s what those Marvel folks are. There’s only really a handful of them that I dealt with. Four of them. They’re all artists, and none of them have big egos. If you check your ego at the door, and the studio works with you without ego, you can do amazing things. The whole process becomes a joy.

Tell me your first impression of Doctor Strange from the first time you were exposed to the character, that one thing you wanted to carry through in bringing into the big screen. That certain essence that hit you as a kid when you first found him.

It’s a really good question. It’s two things: one, the weirdness of other dimensions. That’s probably first and foremost. I think that’s probably, for most people who latch on to “Doctor Strange,” it was so much weirder than other comics. It was just so much more imaginative.

You read those Lee/Ditko comics now, and even after all this time, and even after the movie has been made, I can still go back and read all those early “Strange” tales, and the early first iterations of the “Doctor Strange” comics, and still be amazed at how innovative it is, and how it’s still state of the art. So that was the first thing.

And the second thing was, really, what is the final image of the movie: Doctor Strange, the lonely iconic figure in the Sanctum Sanctorum. I think I was always really struck by the loneliness that this figure who stands between our world and other dimensions, and stands alone, and places himself in a position of, not a public notoriety, he’s not Spider-Man who everybody talks about.

He’s just put himself in a really odd, lonely position, and that lonely iconic view of him against the window, Sanctum Sanctorum, for years as I thought about “Doctor Strange,” that’s always the first thing that comes to my mind. That’s who Doctor Strange is. So the fact that that’s the image that we leave at the end of the movie, it just had to be that in my mind, because that’s who he is.

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