I'm a big fan of revenge, I think [Sweeney Todd] it's a story of a man who clearly has obsessions to avenge the horror that happened to him.

Barrie and the wonderful characters he created, Lewis Carroll, even French literature, like Baudelaire or over in the States, Poe, you open those books, you open The Flowers of Evil and begin to read. If it were written today, you'd be absolutely stupefied by the work. It's this incredible period where the work is timeless, ageless. So yeah, I just love all those guys. It's my deep passion in those great 19th century writers.

Well, having no intelligence, I'm looking forward to gaining some, whether artificial, superficial or super-duper.

I just happen to be a sucker for humor. So anywhere I can sneak in something that I find potentially interesting or funny I do it as much as I can get away with.

Growing old is unavoidable, but never growing up is possible. I believe you can retain certain things from your childhood if you protect them - certain traits, certain places where you don’t let the world go.

For me, the question was, how can one take a live-action performance and put it in the parameter of one of those cartoons? How much can you get away with?

Alice and I, we'd met before, but we were able to kind of sit and chat on the set of Dark Shadows, and talk about maybe writing some songs together. We started doing that, and then one thing led to another and it became this Vampire project - because he was telling stories about all those days, which were fascinating.