The thing with animation is that you record the actors like a radio show and then the animators become actors in their own way because it's their job to take this puppets and make them seem alive. They bring their own personalities to the way they move these puppets.

On Fantastic Mr. Fox, I got used to working with animated storyboards as a way of planning for the shoot. We did a lot of sequences that way with this movie. Partly as a result of that, I decided to build more sets in order to do certain shots.

The thing with animation is that you record the actors like a radio show and then the animators become actors in their own way because it's their job to take this puppets and make them seem alive. They bring their own personalities to the way they move these puppets.

The only thing that takes away from it is when they steal some music from one of my movies and put it in a TV commercial. I am not crazy about influencing TV commercials. But if I legitimately influence someone making a movie, I think that is really flattering.

Any time someone doesn't like one on the first run, I hope they will give it another shot. At least we'll get another chance. But I do feel, in my approach, I am not really a minimalist. I don't like to leave out ideas that I think could add something to the story. Sometimes, you can't quite pick up on all of it in one sitting. It's not by design. But maybe it's a side effect of my approach.

India is a place where one of the great pleasures for a foreigner is that you're constantly surprised. Everywhere you look is something that is either funny, or very moving, but there is always so much that is so unexpected.

I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.