Cola-09 wrote:I think there's really just two possibilities. Either Anno has all the in-universe answers but deliberately keeps them away for the sake of future content that he's gonna feed us little by little for more $$$. Or he never really fleshed out the lore and was hoping that the brand, fan service and neat 3d animations would come up for it.
Edit: Anno being a screenwriter, director and producer and him working several years on one title, I tend to lean to the former. I'm having a hard time to believe that Anno who meticulously works on a few frames until perfection, would then suddenly lower his ambitions when it comes to the story.
Oh I don't think that Anno never cared about the lore, for example according to side-materials, he had a clear idea for some of the mysteries in 2.0 and removed some passages that explained clearly things otherwise implied, although we don't know if that was just to make things more mysterious or because he changed his mind (like: the blood mark on the Moon was indeed a consequence of Second Impact, SEELE knew all along that Bardiel infected Unit 03 and let it happen on purpose to weaken Gendo and get data on human/Angel hybridization, and Shinji's weird "hell train" dreams through 1.0 a,d 2.0 that didn't had any in-universe explanation was to be revealed to be Gendo submitting him to brainwashing)
Similarly, Maya Saakamoto (Mari's VA) revealed in an interview that Anno had a backstory thought for Mari, and only revealed it to her.
What I think happened is simply that by the time of Thrice, Anno was mostly interested in putting Evangelion behind him and trying new things on the technical side of filmmaking to use in his future Tokusatsu works, hence (as Konja7 wrote faster than me) why he talks mostly about the technical aspects of the movie's creative process rather than about the story or lore.