I loved The Sarah Connor Chronicles that Josh did, and I loved that it was a family drama with a huge, different element. And this is also a family drama with a huge, very different element. I think he'll kill it. It will be great.

You're looking, moment by moment and scene by scene, how you can tell the most interesting story. So, we had this great short and we knew that we had a story about a boy and his dog. Because we had that pure emotional core, we could go on crazy tangents and always come back to Victor and Sparky. When I wrote in stuff like Weird Girl and the cat poop, Dutch Day and the windmill, it felt like it was part of Tim's universe.

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 loved The Sarah Connor Chronicles that Josh did, and I loved that it was a family drama with a huge, different element. And this is also a family drama with a huge, very different element. I think he'll kill it. It will be great.

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.

I counted it up once. I think I have written 45 full screenplays. Of those, maybe 15 have been shot, in some form. That's a pretty good track record, but it's not 100%. It is frustrating that, as a screenwriter, I've seen all those movies and they don't exist in the real world. They're juts inside my head and on those pages.

You know something has really stuck in Tim's head when he's drawn what the character looks like. Weird Girl and Elsa actually switched places, at one point. I may be mis-remembering it, but the original design for Weird Girl was actually Elsa, but then it became Winona Ryder's character, and the new Weird Girl was just fantastic with those giant wide eyes.