After studying in Sheffield, I went down to London to do my post-graduate degree at the National Film and Television School, embarking on the movie that would eventually become 'A Grand Day Out.

With some CGI, I think the brain slightly perceives that things aren't real. There's no gravity, the light's not quite real, the shadows aren't quite real.

When I was a teenager, my dad watched my films and told me I could go to art college and study animation. He made me see that I could do this for a living.

My father, an architectural photographer, was an incurable tinkerer, maker and mender.

I'm always there at home thinking of Wallace and Gromit ideas.

Americans like the British kind of quirkiness and the strange accent. They find it kind of cute or something, with a certain charm.

I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.