Mike is still sitting on his private interview, but fortunately we don't have to wait for him for the press-conference, as Behind comes through with the transcript. Visit the origin for the whole thing, it's quite amusing:

Q: There are some similarities between Lagrange and Evangelion. Was this purposeful?

A: Evangelion followed the formula where the main character starts off unable to pilot, but decides to get in the robot and sees himself improve, much like previous robot anime. For us, we wanted to take Shinji and make him a girl with a jersey.

I find it most enlightening that directors do not have to have a complex about EVA. Izubuchi tried to explain it before, as I understand now, but something did not click. Evangelion was a point on the curve. It was influential, but built upon its predecessors as well. Therefore, all the talk about RahXephon, Fafner, and the like "copying" it is just bull, completely missing the nature of anime as a living art.

UPDATE: Mike posted a transcript on 2012/07/20.

Lagrange seems to have some similarity to Evangelion: you’ve got a blue uniform girl, an orange/red uniformed girl, but Madoka is very different from Shinji. Was this intentional? After all, Nadesico had parodies of Evangelion.

It’s not so much a parody of Evangelion… actually Evangelion is very much a summation of the whole history of robot anime, where a boy that has never ridden on a robot [learns to] ride it and look for his purpose. It started from Mazinger Z, whose plot is the “royal road” of robot anime. Evangelion took the same road: what if you put a boy like Shinji in the robot? That’s how Evangelion was made. So, in terms of that, this is similar: what if we put a jersey girl [in a robot]?