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.

Don't differentiate between 'This is a job' and 'This is what I'm doing for fun.' It's all simultaneous.

I like naps. I don't drink coffee.

I always aspire to that, where it feels like the film was made by the characters as opposed to the filmmakers. I try to be invisible.

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.

I was lucky enough to know Maurice Sendak, and talked to him about doing the movie. For a while, I was really apprehensive of it, because Where The Wild Things Are is a book I love so much, and I didn't want to add something to it just to be able to make a movie, or put my stamp on it, or something like that.

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