All I can say is that with 'The Golden Compass,' I didn't get to make the movie I had planned to make. When I look at the film, at the casting and certain scenes, I'm very happy. As for the final product, I can't vouch for that.

'The Golden Compass' became a bad experience because the studio didn't have faith in the strength of the ideas of the novel, which is ironic because it's one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written, if not the greatest, and they took the religion out of it and tried to turn it into a popcorn movie.

Don't you get it? It's the end of the world! That's exactly when you fall in love. When else?

To be emotionally resilient and to overcome your circumstances, not through fighting, but through being courageous and having endurance was something I thought was of primary importance.

Modern responses to Cinderella's predicament are interesting. If you're not careful, you'll think, "Well, she's just a big wimp. She should fight for her rights. She should call the government."

The reason that stepmothers are often the bad guy in fairy tales is because people died in childbirth, all the time, so fathers remarried and there would be a struggle between the children and the new wife, in terms of who would inherit what.

It's easy in a novel to be completely unambiguous about the relationship between animal and daemon simply by stating it outright; whereas you get very few opportunities to do this in an elegant way in a film.