Anytime you adapt work of somebody who you respect, as much as I respect him, it's an enormous responsibility. In honoring that responsibility, what we try to do is to continually use his work, and the writing that he did about his life and his work, as our guide. That starts with his intent for what he was trying to express when he wrote it, and it extends to his intent overall.

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.

When you take that to the next level of guiding a group of filmmakers to actually depict him, it's even more challenging. The one that that I think everybody involved believes is that we won't move forward with this until we believe it's right. There's no deadline that a movie has to be made by. We have to believe that we have served the responsibility, however long it takes us to get to that point.

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.

I take his [Theodore Geisel] legacy very, very seriously. I know others may disagree because he's made such an impact on so many people that response to work becomes very personal, so people will have different points of view. But, at the core of this, I take the protection and the extension of his legacy very, very seriously. It's a very important part of my life.

What I've found is there is no barometer that allows you to chart when you're oversaturating a desire. You're left really trying to respond on a gut level, because by the time you might do research, it's already too late. There's also a healthy tension between what are very sound business objectives and a very amorphous desire to preserve what's special.

Tone is an interesting question because part of the inspiration of looking to song is that Geisel himself - when you think about his animated version of The Grinch - embraced the idea of using songs in unconventional ways, as part of conveying a narrative. The use of music, in this film, is very unconventional, which I love.