I don’t really look for challenges as much as I like adventures. Other than that I’m just trying to find stories I want to tell.
I don’t know what is in store for the movie business any better than anybody else does, but it does seem like my kind of movies are a little trickier than it used to be – or maybe a lot trickier.
I guess when I think about it, one of the things I like to dramatise, and what is sometimes funny, is someone coming unglued. I don’t consider myself someone who is making the argument that I support these choices. I just think it can be funny.
Sometimes if the people are up for trying something that I’m interested in, it can be a great experience.
When I see the first dailies on any movie, I usually feel that I had no idea how this combination of ingredients was going to mix together, what it was going to produce.
I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly bothered or obsessed with detail.
Kids are always open to anything. It’s very rare that a kid isn’t extremely eager to make you happy.
On Fantastic Mr. Fox, I got used to working with animated storyboards as a way of planning for the shoot. We did a lot of sequences that way with this movie. Partly as a result of that, I decided to build more sets in order to do certain shots.
I’ve never had a movie that got great reviews. I’ve had movies that got different levels of good and bad reviews, but you can more or less count on plenty of bad reviews.
Sometimes when you’re editing a movie, you have the thing that you don’t expect – which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.
India is a place where one of the great pleasures for a foreigner is that you’re constantly surprised. Everywhere you look is something that is either funny, or very moving, but there is always so much that is so unexpected. That’s part of the reason why people who like it tend to love it.
Usually when I’m making a movie, what I have in mind first, for the visuals, is how we can stage the scenes to bring them more to life in the most interesting way, and then how we can make a world for the story that the audience hasn’t quite been in before.
I didn’t think so much of him at first. But now I get it: he’s everything that I’m not.
I’m very sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.
The only thing that takes away from it is when they steal some music from one of my movies and put it in a TV commercial. I am not crazy about influencing TV commercials. But if I legitimately influence someone making a movie, I think that is really flattering.
That’s the kind of movie that I like to make, where there is an invented reality and the audience is going to go someplace where hopefully they’ve never been before. The details, that’s what the world is made of.
I will say that Edward Norton, who plays the scout master, would be a first-rate Eagle Scout. He’s got all those techniques. If your plane crashes into the jungle somewhere, he would be the guy you would want to have with you.
I usually set aside a lot of time in advance of a movie with important roles for kids to search, but when you have great ones, they can be a real ace in the hole.
The thing with animation is that you record the actors like a radio show and then the animators become actors in their own way because it’s their job to take this puppets and make them seem alive. They bring their own personalities to the way they move these puppets.
I have always wanted to work in the theater. I’ve always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I’ve never actually done it – not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I’ve had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater is a part of my movie work.