Director Ben Young had one hell of a career surge with two rapid-fire films: Hounds of Love and Extinction.

Young broke out in a big way with his 2016 debut, the highly-lauded independent crime-horror drama Hounds of Love. The tense-as-hell picture earned Ashleigh Cummings a ‘Best Actress in a Debut Film’ win at the Venice Film Festival and a ‘Best Lead Actress’ win for Emma Booth at 2017’s Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards. The film also shot Young into the spotlight – almost overnight.

After rave reviews for Hounds of Love started hitting big outlets, Hollywood was immediately knocking. As Young tells us in the 25-minute-plus interview that you can watch below, he barely had a second to breathe before being flown out to meet big-time producers. He’d soon landed a big one: a directing gig on $20 million-budget sci-fi film Extinction. While that jump up in projects was certainly exciting and for the most part enjoyable, Young tells us his experience on the big production was like “making a 2-hour television commercial.” To put it simply: “The movie that went out to the world, was not the movie that I had intended to make.”

We also discussed Extinction being removed from a theatrical release to be released by Netflix, how he responded to the vastly different critical receptions given to both films, the Australian film industry, and more. Enjoy.