Where The Wild Things Are we were asking a lot of a 9-year-old kid. We were asking a lot of any actor.

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

On everything I do I'm always taking someone's money, whether it's a movie studio or a record label. Somebody's paying for it, and I'm always respectful of that. But I'm never going to compromise.

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.

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.

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

I think the way kids create is so inspiring. They're drawing a picture? They love the picture they drew; they're not tortured about it.