When I was a kid, I loved all the classic books about children making do for themselves and surviving in the wild: titles like The Boxcar Children, Andrew Henry’s Meadow, Julie Of The Wolves, The Swiss Family Robinson and, especially, a lot of stories from Calvin And Hobbes. What excited me the most were the more real world aspects of these stories. The day to day necessities: building shelter, finding food and supplies. The pragmatic thrills of survival. The details. The textures. The everyday minutiae. The exhilarating excitement of unsupervised freedom, and the ennui of long days with nothing much to do.

That's what I wanted to capture in my film- that, and the confusion and loneliness that so often go hand in hand with that sense adventure. I remember the day when it first occurred to me that I was growing up - it was when I went to kindergarten for the first time and realized that I was going to have to get up early every morning from that point onwards for the rest of my life. You start to look ahead like that, you get old in a hurry, and that's sort of what ST. NICK is about

- David Lowery