After working so long on something like this, it's great to go out and meet people and see the reactions and remind yourself that, oh, yeah,, I wasn't just working in a cave by myself for no reason...

Most people's personalities and roles are locked by the time they're nine or 10. I think there's something to that.

It's naturally kind of humiliating and strange to have a microphone; when you're young you just make movies, you don't worry about all the peripheral stuff that comes with it.

After working so long on something like this, it's great to go out and meet people and see the reactions and remind yourself that, oh, yeah,, I wasn't just working in a cave by myself for no reason...

So much of the writing is not conscious, in the sense that it's not calculated. I remember in film school we had so many studies with big fancy words where you could dissect a movie and make charts of all of the characters' complicated inner relations and themes and what does this mean? And it's overwhelming as a student. It's great for a student, but as a writer, it's paralyzing.

If an audience finds themselves paying attention to how you made your film, you're sunk because that means they're unplugged from your story. What matters is what's unfolding on the screen, not how you put it there. It doesn't matter if it's red triangles or million dollar software if the audience doesn't care.

Traditionally, digital projects, when you project them, they get really washed out. It's complicated stuff with gamma, but basically your blacks get very milky and the colors get very weak, and we made so many different versions of it to just pump more color into it, so it would look just as good in the theater as it does on your screen at home. And color was my constant whine. It needed to be very oversaturated.