Your friends are really an extension of your vision of the world. It's kind of a physical manifestation of how you feel. Like your soul.

There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

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.

I want to make a film about a factory worker.

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

It has to be very tight to seem loose.

If you establish rules and play by them, the audience will buy in.