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.

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.

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.

Most times a person grows up gradually, but I found myself in a hurry... Hoping to find an answer, I uncovered an article about the common goldfish. "Kept in a small bowl, the goldfish will remain small. With more space, the fish will double, triple, or quadruple in size." It occurred to me then that I was intended for larger things. After all, a giant man can't have an ordinary-sized life.

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 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.

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.