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.

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.

It's not fair to use movies that weren't creatively successful as a reason why something won't work.

The idea right now - and it may evolve - would be a live-action movie where some of his characters would be animated. To me, this movie is very much about the creative process.

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.

When you listen to the music in this film [Despicable Me], it's working on the level of melody, but the other key element is lyrics. There are a number of songs in the film where the lyrics themselves are very much speaking to the essence of what Ted Geisel was setting out to do.

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.