Big emotions that are unexplained are really scary. At least to me.

It's fun when you start a movie, because it's kind of like you get to go Christmas shopping... you get to make your wish list and you start thinking about what each character needs.

The things that are really out of control, and scary, are emotions - of people around you, that are unpredictable, or those in yourself which are unpredictable.

Emotions are messy and hard to figure out.

I feel like you only have so much time to make stuff. I'm definitely aware of that. I'm also excited about it.

Finding a kid that could be introspective and internal and thoughtful, and then also be wild and free and guileless and physical, it was hard. So at the end we started getting down to panic time, and we still hadn't found our Max. And we decided to go about it a different way. We said, "Let's just find friends of ours that live in interesting cities in the country that maybe aren't as big, and people that don't do casting." And thinking maybe you find a place that has an artistic community, maybe we'll find some interesting kids from there.

If I can make one generalised statement, and generalised statements are never entirely true, nobody wants to be talked down to, kids included.