But steady-cams are very different than hand-helds, because hand-held gives you that verite feel.

Every film had its own grammar. And it's your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story.

I've been joking that if Madonna taught us anything, you've got to reinvent yourself. I think it's important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you've got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances. I've tried to take a chance with every film I've done - I've never done it the easy way, and I think that's because that's what excites me, is making as big a mountain as I can in front of me, and just trying to mount it.

I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.

Also expressionistic filmmaking - making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

Artist and illustrator R. Crumb did a whole illustration of Genesis. And he didn't go away from the text; he was totally truthful. Reading through that, I was like, "Oh, wow, it's a comic-book version of the Bible." There's a lot of heavy-duty stuff that goes on that doesn't make it into Sunday school.