The beauty of doing film is that you construct whatever you do block by block and you can build something that will stay.

At school I was very shy. I wasn't funny really.

My grandfather lived across the garden from us, and in his attic he had a lot of radios, appliances and inventions that he had made over 50 years, such as a keyboard called a clavioline, which can be heard on some Beatles songs - it was popular in the 60s. So we had all that at home.

I think the purpose of test screenings is different for the studio and for the filmmaker. For the studio, I think they want to know whether the film works or not.

The problem is, with a lot of children's films, they are very commercial.

It's part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.

I always wanted to create this community that would come and tell their own story, shoot it - and watch them. The idea is to not have one entity who creates the work, the project, and another entity who consumes it; the idea is people create their own work, like somebody cultivating his garden.