And I wanted to do a movie [Moonrise Kingdom] about a childhood romance - a very powerful experience of childhood romance. About what it's like to just be blindsided, when you're in fifth grade or sixth grade, by these kinds of feelings. Along the way, I sort of mixed in some interest in "young adult fantasy" writing.

You don't do background music the way a lot of more conventional films do. The music is often kind of a character in your films to the extent that sometimes you stop and watch someone perform a song.

I want to try not to repeat myself. But then I seem to do it continuously in my films. It's not something I make any effort to do. I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience. I feel I get criticized for style over substance, and for details that get in the way of the characters. But every decision I make is how to bring those characters forward.

Mostly with commercial work, it isn't about personal vision. It's not a personal effort, it's work for hire. That's more my attitude with those. You just want to be a professional worker.

Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I've never been down before is like going to a movie.

I've always loved stop motion animation and I particularly wanted to do stop motion with puppets that have fur, for whatever reason that is.

If somebody asks me about the themes of something I'm working on, I never have any idea what the themes are. . . . Somebody tells me the themes later. I sort of try to avoid developing themes. I want to just keep it a little bit more abstract. But then, what ends up happening is, they say, 'Well, I see a lot here that you did before, and it's connected to this other movie you did,' and . . . that almost seems like something I don't quite choose. It chooses me.