I'm not saying this just to be self-deprecating, but I have always taken delight in playing people who are oblivious, because I do think I have giant, giant blind spots. It's a very comfortable place to be.

The truth is I've just never had any kind of plan at all for my career, which is probably not a very flattering thing to admit. I don't know that I'd ever planned to be in this situation. I'm still just an idiot, really really stupid. It's not like I'm now a genius because this has happened. I just got hugely lucky.

I think there are pluses and minuses to being simpleminded. The minus is not having any sort of vision for the future. But on the plus side, my wife and I have really been happy through all of the ups and downs.

I'm not a technical person, at all, but you get a little bit more of a sense for how to get something done a little bit more efficiently. I think everybody is in that place where it's a little bit more efficient, but the process is still the same, which is still loose and collaborative.

I've done animated TV stuff, but I'd never done animated film work, which is much more involved and much more labor intensive. The animators are much more meticulous and detailed. It's just been really fun and really satisfyingly creative.

The scheduling thing is really weird with TV shows. Certain projects haven't been able to work out because of the schedule, so some of it is out of your control. You don't have very many opportunities. There isn't much time, so you want to make sure you're going to be doing something that you really feel good about or that you're going to have a good creative experience doing. You're taking up vacation time from your job, so you want it to be meaningful.

I got a little bit of a sense for the subculture, which is the equivalent of any subculture, really. The stakes are high, even if you live in a small town. It's like the annual bass fishing contests, or whatever it is. The stakes are always absurdly high, and this is no different. The competition at this butter carving things, from what I understand, is not that far off from what we're depicting in the movie.