Ready Player One is almost here, and a newly released featurette gives us a closer look into the story’s balance of nostalgia and looking to the future.

Ernest Cline’s smash novel Ready Player One is set in a bleak future, but the heart of the story really leans in hard on the nostalgia for ’80s pop culture. Happily, the brains behind many of the well-loved films mentioned in Cline’s novel, Steven Spielberg, is directing the film.

Related: Ready Player One trailer introduces Parzival, Halliday’s Hunt

Of course, the challenge in bringing Cline’s novel to the big screen was to make a movie that paid tribute and showed love to the past while also looking toward the future. In a new featurette released about the film, Spielberg and Cline discuss bringing the film to life, and how they maintained that tricky balance of past and future.

The Ready Player One film is highly anticipated, but one of the biggest questions is how in the world anyone will manage to bring the crazy, virtual reality universe of the OASIS into something able to be filmed. The featurette has Spielberg discussing this very thing, and he explains that he and Cline worked very closely together on this. Together, the two managed to take the book and work out which bits would work best for film, and expand from there.

Of course, it makes sense that the studio would want to keep as much of what we’ll see in the film version of the OASIS a secret to keep fan interest high. While we’ve seen some pop culture-packed glimpses of OASIS in the trailers, a lot of it is still a mystery. We’re excited to see how Spielberg manages to recreate such a vast, unique universe into the medium of film.

‘Ready Player One’ premieres on March 30; will you be seeing it?