Take it back, Ed. Take it all back.

I think pirates, like astronauts, particularly for a boy, are always kind of worth thinking about.

When somebody is a little bit wrong - say, when a waited puts nonfat milk in your espresso macchiato, instead of lowfat milk - it is often quite easy to explain to them how and why they are wrong. But if somebody is surprisingly wrong - say, when a waiter bites your nose instead of taking your order - you can often be so surprised that you are unable to say anything at all. Paralyzed by how wrong the waiter is, your moth would hang slightly open and your eyes would blink over and over, but you would be unable to say a word.

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night's sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.

I never thought about whether film is inherently more sincere, because certainly I think if Guy Maddin had directed A Series Of Unfortunate Events, there probably could have been more of the stage-y irony that is in the books. But I was just interested to see what people would do with it, and worrying that Brad Silberling wouldn't do what I had in mind.

Occasionally there are parents who say, "I brought my child so he or she could learn what the career of a writer is like, and you did this long theatrical performance instead, and I'm very disappointed."

The idea that the curtain rises on what is often more or less a happy scene, and it will fall just a few hours later, and everyone will be dead or have gone mad... I find that kind of narrative very appealing.