With each movie I have a different set of inspirations.

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.

My experience with casting children is that... the whole movie is going to rest on their shoulders, so you have to set aside time and wait for the perfect people to appear.

A lot of people have said my movies are all the same. But I don't actually make an effort to have a style. I'm usually just thinking of what can we do to make it funnier or more interesting or just kind of refine it and it ends up like that.

Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.

I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience.

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.