I knew that this was the movie in which a lot of the cinema version of Burton-esque first started. So, I knew that there were things that were hugely important to him for it, but it didn't really feel that different than working on any other of these projects.

One of those strange things that happens in movies is that you need someone to actually say people's names, or else you have no idea who those kids are. This was a way for her to introduce who the important boys were in the story, but then it just was so funny that it became a centerpiece to it. When you look at the character design that Tim did for Weird Girl, and what Catherine [O'Hara] did with the voice, and it's gonna kill.

I've always written towards movies that take place across two worlds. Most of the movies that I've worked on take place in two worlds, or sometimes three worlds, where you have a normal world and a fantasy world that mix and overlap. I never shy away from the series stuff in the real world. Big Fish is about mortality.

When Tim asked me to do Frankenweenie, he had his original sketches from before he did the short, of what Sparky looked like, and he drew Victor and some of the other crucial people. The remarkable thing about working with Tim is that, once he's read a script, he sketches out everybody else.

With Corpse Bride, I saw a lot more of it during the process because we were changing things a lot. When I came onto Corpse Bride, it wasn't a musical.

I knew that Weird Girl was going to be kind of amazing. The secret truth of Weird Girl is that I put her in there originally because I needed some way to set the boys' names.

The producers and I first talked about the Big Fish musical, right before we did the first test screening of the movie. I said, "I think there's a Broadway musical here." And really, from that day, we started figuring out how we would do it.