Director Jon Favreau, who wrote and starred in the 1996 indie hit Swingers, is an old-fashioned guy whose tastes run on the nostalgic side. He grooves to the tunes of Sinatra. He is obsessed with hot rods, especially his own 1932 Ford, which he proudly shows off in his Santa Monica garage. And, he strives to make movies that harken back to the days before computer-generated images.

The sci-fi fantasy Zathura, which opened Friday, is based on the popular book by Chris Van Allsberg (Jumanji, The Polar Express). It stars Josh Hutcherson and Jonah Bobo as squabbling young brothers from a broken home who find an old board game called Zathura in the basement of their father's (Tim Robbins) house. The mysterious game sends them -- and the house -- hurtling through deepest, darkest outer space, where they encounter an angry robot, hungry aliens named Zorgons and four-eyed sheep.

Dax Shepard plays a stranded astronaut the two boys rescue while playing the game; Kristen Stewart is the boys' teenage sister who is clueless to what's happening. In the end, the brothers are forced to overcome their differences to finish the game to safely return home.

Though there was money in the Zathura budget to create a computer-generated image of a house being catapulted through space, Favreau opted to have a miniature made.

"When you look at the house, there is something subconscious about it. You are looking at something real. It is not an `artistic interpretation' of a house," he said.

Of course, he didn't entirely ignore state-of-the-art special effects. "We used the best technology to composite and put the lighting together, and we have CG backgrounds," he said, which combined make it appear as if the miniature house is indeed rocketing its way through space.

Favreau called on veteran special effects wizard Stan Winston to create the killer robot -- sort of a maniacal cousin to Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet -- as well as the meat-eating Zorgon space creatures the boys must battle.

Using real props, he said, "forces you to shoot them in a way where you use a lot of darkness. You don't show everything. What starts to happen is the film takes a nostalgic feel because you are forced not to show as much as you would were it CGI. The audiences' imaginations are used a lot more. That is the style of storytelling Spielberg mastered with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET."

Favreau's good friend Peter Billingsley (Ralphie from A Christmas Story') is co-producer on Zathura, and credits the director with having "a clear-cut vision from Day 1. I know the term `vision' is overused, but, really, he had a vision for these things before he ever started. When he read the script, he quickly saw a world. And the world that he pitched [to the studio] and talked about two years ago is now on the screen."

The film's young actors said Favreau never dismissed them as just kids. "He totally treated us with respect," Hutcherson, 13, said. "He treated us like adult actors. It really helped because it felt like he really cared about how the performance turned out. It makes a kid feel really good."

Favreau was involved in the creation of the Zathura game that launches the movie's events -- a board game made of tin, which doles out an instruction card with every turn of the key.

He sat through dozens of meetings to discuss just the right amount of aging for each card and insisted that a Monopoly-like font be used on the cards.

Needless to say, a board game based on the one in the film is coming out for the holidays. "I just saw a commercial on TV for the game, and it looked like it could have been a commercial for when I was a kid," Favreau said.

"When they make a video game to a family movie, not a lot of care is put into it. I got involved in the script and wanted to tell a story that is consistent with the film."

Next up, Favreau is developing Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars at Paramount. He also has an animated movie in the works at Sony and is producing a pilot for Fox. But there's a common thread in all these projects: They keep Favreau close to home so that he can watch SpongeBob SquarePants with his toddlers, Max and Maddie.

"Nothing holds a candle to the health and happiness of my family," he said. "I won't direct anything that keeps me away from them. With Elf, at the last minute they pulled it from L.A. and made me shoot the studio work in Vancouver. My family couldn't come because my wife has a career. It took a long time to get back to where we were before I left. [My daughter] was in my wife's belly. And I missed a big chunk of my son's life, and he had to get to know me again. So I won't let them show me a script that takes me out of town. Sometimes it's a deal breaker and sometimes it's not."

It wasn't a deal breaker with Zathura, which was shot on the Sony lot near his home on a tree-lined street in Santa Monica. In fact, Favreau purchased the house next to the one he shares with his physician wife and turned it into his office, so that he could be closer to home.

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