I just now put [Robert Altman] down feeling heartbroken but happily and deeply inspired. . . . Wonderful.

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.

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.

With each movie I have a different set of inspirations.

I don't know what is in store for the movie business any better than anybody else does, but it does seem like my kind of movies are a little trickier than it used to be - or maybe a lot trickier.

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.

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.