I think casting is really important. Finding the right sensibility for the right part is an art in itself. If you're off there, you make it harder on yourself as a director. And it's fun to work that out with the actors. I don't think there's any magic to directing actors. It's very instinctual. Working with actors is really one of my favorite creative moments of the whole process, and the most fun, because it's collaborative. I spend a lot of time rehearsing. I'm very rehearsal-oriented, probably because I have some background in theater. I like knowing what will work beforehand.

Yeah, a memory's never finished, if you really think about it.

When you're in love, you're asking someone else to fulfill all your unfulfilled needs, to make you whole, and to make you feel good about everything, and no one can do that.

Everything that you could think about in life, or experience, or be interested in, theoretically should be expressed or dealt with in cinema. But the way typical narratives are set up, there's no room for philosophy, because it's just digressive material. It's not advancing the plot, so there's no place for it. It's the kind of stuff you would cut out, and that you shouldn't have put in there to begin with.

If the animators could hide something so secretly that I could watch it numerous times, both on the computer and on the screen, and not pick up on it, then it deserves to be in the movie. But if they had more overt things, I'd often tell them to cut it out. In general, as long as they captured the spirit of the character, then they're fine. But sometimes it took a while, and we had to replace a lot of animators.

…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.

Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size.