I want to experience a performance on all levels - I want goose bumps and I want to leave the movie or play arguing about something that's unresolved.

When we were kids, you picked up a little paper and put it on a stick; and when you waved it back and forth, you understood the power of air underneath the wings. In that way, a child begins to understand abstraction, poetry, metaphor, symbolism. You play with the materials you have and use your imagination to make them into something else. That what's so sad about having everything on a little screen - it's not physical and dimensional, and that seems backward.

I've never been a puppeteer, I conceive and I write and I design and I direct. And not just puppets. I direct actors, I direct dancers, I direct singers, I direct films. I also direct puppeteers. I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that.

Directing is much more psychological-it's a lot like being a general. And you have to be organized. While you're making a film, you have between two and 500 people asking you a billion questions.

People have become so literal because they're used to reality-based television.

Some of my ideas for film or theater come to me in dreams. I'm also very creative when I'm talking to others. I believe in collaboration.

One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it.