Can you tell us a little bit about the decision to shoot the film in black & white as opposed to color?

I wanted the film to have a classic feel. Like the old noir aesthetic. In addition, I felt the contrast between black and white would better reflect the relationship between good and evil than color could. Also for a film  as symbolic and stylized as this, color would have been distracting.

I agree with Thomas that color would have been distracting for LIMBO, simply because it is too soft. Gradation of color in film - and in video, in particular - is so smooth that you risk losing the hard, noir aesthetic that LIMBO has. Because it is NOT color, it requires an audience to focus on film content and increases the audience's perception of the filmmaker's stylistic choices. I think LIMBO, in execution, and Thomas' design of the film, is both very specific and successful in regards to content and stylistic choices.

From my catholic background, I knew of the concept of limbo being a purgatory type place between heaven and hell. After reading Dante’s Inferno I decided it would be a good template for making the movie I wanted to write based on morality. After I’d written a first draft of the script, I read Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of morals etc. Those kind of helped me rethink a few concepts and throw in some things that I hadn’t considered.

Are there any particular films you are trying to channel or pay homage to? Any favorite director(s)?

Not really. LIMBO kind of became its own thing, and now I have trouble even categorizing it. Philosophical mystery? Psychological thriller? Metaphysical mystery? In the beginning I was influenced by Memento, Unbreakable, and the Usual Suspects. Seven did play a small part too, but all these were more emotional leanings than real influences. If anything, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, or Vertigo are closer to what I was going for with one man’s total confusion and the feeling of getting more and more tangled in nothingness. Albert Camus' book L'Etranger (The Stranger) also shares some similarities with LIMBO, though I read that after the film was done.

Kubrick. Especially all of his films from Dr. Strangelove to Barry Lyndon. There is such a specificity and clarity and unique stylistic originality to each of his films in that period. His films piqued your intellect without being too singularly personal, and that is very hard to accomplish when style and content are so meticulously stitched together with the content. With 2001 he essentially demonstrated to the audience how to completely discard emotional, intellectual, and kinesthetic conventions and taught them a new of thinking about relationship between sound and picture.

The ending of the film is virtually  wide open, but some may say that very few questions are answered after everything is said and done. Did you intentionally leave the film open (maybe for a possible sequel) or was it for length/budgetary reasons?

LIMBO's ending was actually less open when I first came on to the project; it became more open as Thomas came up with ideas for more scenes that emphasized the philosophical questions of what does a person do when there are no restrictions to your actions (for an hour, anyway), and the resulting affect on the human mind. The new scenes reflected the rather delicate nature of human thinking, and specifically made Adam's dilemma more tangible, so I was therefore very excited by the way these new scenes impacted the "open" quality of the end.

By the nature of limbo, there can be no real resolution. I wanted to emphasize that. The circle never ends. Is there an answer for life itself? Or is man born to die, to be born to die, to be born to die? I wanted the viewer to be allowed to draw his or her own conclusions from the many questions raised in the film because, truly, I don’t have the answers for them either! Yes I have a sequel planned called Inferno. If one day I actually have a film  career, I’ll make it. It is going to be a horror thriller. A cross between The Exorcist and Seven.

What was it like shooting in real world locations; I read that the police paid you a visit.

It was tough. But it’s New York, where’d we find a studio to shoot in if we wanted to? Yeah, the cops paid us a visit. Go to the website and look at the photos. It wasn’t a good day.

Ahh, the police. They paid us 3 visits throughout the shoot. There is nothing like filming in New York. With a small crew we were able to get in and out of locations without bothering too many people.

On the technical side, Mac or PC, and what tools did you use to put the whole thing together?

We used Macs for just about everything. The main programs were Final Cut Pro, Logic, After Effects and Pro Tools.

There are other NLEs (non-linear editors) out there other than Final Cut Pro, but that particular system is the only one that feels as if it was not done in some basement by some engineer who doesn't have a lot of real-world long-form experience, and it is clear Apple intends to keep it integrated with other finishing tools (Soundtrack Pro, Motion, LiveType, Shake, et al). Although its editing surface is not the most elegant, its overall systemic design and dependability makes it a frontrunner. I wouldn't doubt, with HDV on the very near horizon, that it will emerge as a front runner (if not THE front runner) for editing systems, much like Kudelski's Nagra sound recorder became a standard for many years recording sound on film sets.