When I was nine, I asked my Dad, ‘Can I have your movie camera? That old, wind-up 8-millimeter movie camera that’s in your drawer?’ And he goes, ‘Sure, take it.’ And I took it, and I started making movies with it, and I started being as creative as I could, and never once in my life did my parents ever say, ’ What you’re doing is a waste of time.’ Never….. I know there are kids out there that don’t have that support system. So, if you’re out there and you’re listening, listen to me: If you wanna be creative, get out there and do it. It’s not a waste of time.

I feel like I have a group of friends, guys could be interchanged with my neighbors from back home. These guys are really close and really tight, and it all stems from 'Wouldn't it be cool if this happened.'

My writing is consistently influenced by everything I watched and listened to growing up, so it's just this crazy collage of everything.

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.

For me, I always go back to when I was 10 years old and, I think between the time I was 10 and going to high school, were some of the greatest moments for me, because I had a group of friends that I was inseparable with, who we would make movies with all the time.

More often than not, I'm worried about, where shouldn't we have music? Because the tendency is just to put everything everywhere all the time in a lot of movies. You end up just numbing the audience when you do that and it's not the best way to tell a story.

Brad Bird is fond of saying that music is the easiest thing that can derail a film because if it slightly goes a degree off track it will take the viewer in the wrong emotional direction. To work with people who actually care about that is a good thing.