What I find in a creative company is while there is a desire to build a management foundation that can feel clear and consistent, the unique product we're in Illumination Entertainment making doesn't always allow for that. So rather than following management strategy that talks about building your structure and then staffing that structure, I tend to build the structure around the strengths of the individual people we have.

Songs give you incredible opportunity to convey a tremendous amount in a relatively short period of time. The first thing that John Powell, our composer, says is, "Is the song engaging you to tap your toe?" If you're not tapping your toe, it doesn't matter what you're doing in the song, it's not going to work. But, if you can get the audience to be engaged by the song, then it gives you the opportunity to accomplish so much, in a very concise way.

No matter what happens with technology or whether you're in traditional animation or stop-motion or CG, the biggest challenge always is story. The flow of making the movie is usually determined by how your story is coming together, and when your story is straining and you can't quite get your hands around it, your entire production is straining.

You have to start with the notion that you pick the actor who's going to embody the role, the best person that you can find. If you don't start with that then it sort of defies the whole purpose of trying to make the best film that you can make.

Being branded to some subset of your fans is important when it comes to creating films and characters they're not familiar with. It's enormously difficult to market to a global audience, and it's becoming more difficult. A brand matters to parents, whereas kids are largely driven by their urgent reaction to the product. In the future, where there are going to be choices that have to be made by parents because it will be prohibitively expensive to access everything, those will be driven partially by brand.

I grew up with probably three different authors having a seminal influence on my childhood, Dr. Seuss being one and Maurice Sendak being another. That was my parents, who exposed me to their stories. That's how I was introduced to the whole idea of not just reading, but storytelling in general.

I've carried on, in that same tradition, with my kids. Aside from just his brilliance, in my estimation, I think he had one of the great imaginations of the 20th century. One of the reasons why the tradition carries on, all these years later, is because, as a parent, those are the books that you go to and pull off the shelf because they never stop delighting you.