What I personally gravitate toward tends to be fantasy, medium dark - not too dark - fairy tales and sci fi. Stop-motion takes something on the page thats really dark and adds a little sweetness to it, a living toys realm.
Every kid has a toy that they believe is their best friend, that they believe communicates with them, and they imagine it being alive, their toy horse or car or whatever it is. Stop-motion is the only medium where we literally can make a toy come to life, an actual object.
I love all sorts of animation, probably the most beautiful would be the tradtional hand drawn animation that Disney is known for. Stop-motion has a certain "grittieness" and is filled with imperfections, and yet their is an undeniable truth, that what you see really exits, even it if is posed by hand, 24 times a second. This truth is what I find most attractive about stop-motion animation.
People spend the money where the money is. Nightmare never goes away.
It's nice to be taken seriously.
There's very few people who want to just make beautiful films that make money when they can make films that make huge money.
I feel I'm just meant to do stop-motion. Live-action is much more glamorous to some, but it's basically a whole army of people focused on one thing.
We are suffering from a glut of too many 3-D movies and not enough screens.
I feel like what we love to do is solve problems. If it's easy to solve, we find a more difficult one. There's always a way. In our world, we can build stuff. We can build more sets than you could ever build in live-action. We can build more props just for custom angles or perspectives. We'll build special trees for that, paint a sky. There's really no limitations, except that you run out of time and money at some point.
I love the culture of animation. What stop-motion has in common with live-action is that it has many of the same departments. There's hair, costume, makeup in the form of paint, gaffers, electricians. So there's the same sense of real stuff, real light. But it's not like everything happens at once, like it does in live-action. It's all subdivided into these small sets. It's where my strengths are. Live-action is just an utterly different world, and I'm not a public enough persona to be big and loud at the front of the ship. I'd rather more quietly interact with the artisan animators.
I'm looking at some comedic horror films because I have often been accused of being too dark. I'm not dark, not compared with 'Saw' or anything like that. So I'm looking at live-action horror films, but not slasher ones - ones that have humor and maybe some social satire.
There's definitely the desire out there for young people who want to make the movies.
'Coraline' is Neil Gaiman's book, it sold a lot, it has a big fan base. It was originally conceived to be live action, but I never really wanted it to be. I always thought that it would work better as an animated film.
I'm not a public enough persona to be big and loud at the front of the ship. I'd rather more quietly interact with the artisan animators.
I get rewarded virtually every day with something amazing to see - whether it's a new shot, a miniature sweater, someone who's figured out how to make the hair look really great. We found a way to do the rain, finally. And mud. Make the trees. So I get to stay in constant motion as a director, you know, reviewing things. And there's a lot to review.
Miyazaki's films in Japan are bigger than Titanic. He's an incredible rock star there. In the US, they don't do as well.
There's always kids who become stop motion animators. I get stuff all the time. They put it on YouTube. It's exciting to see.
Anyone can buy CG technology. It's not that it's easy to make those films. Those films are just as difficult, they're incredibly hard to make.
People are very harsh critics of animated humans.
This Golden Globe nomination is sweet validation for the years of hard work it took to bring Coraline to life using stop-motion animation with the greatest crew of animators, artists, and technicians I've ever been privileged to work with. I share this nomination with all of them and we all share our thanks to the Hollywood Foreign Press.
I have more faith in doing something creative for a cable station or something like Yahoo or Google or Amazon. What Netflix did with 'House of Cards' and David Fincher was brilliant. That is inspiring to me. I think there is more chance for creativity in animation, it just hasn't happened there yet.
I'm supporting an up-and-coming director. It's the time in my life that I want to share what I know and pass it along.
Almost any modern video camera can take stills, so there's always this fresh crop of kids that like making things and moving them by hand. So it's as much our desire to keep it going as what we believe is the public's desire for handmade stuff that really feels handmade, where they aren't being tricked into it being handmade.
Having to make a blockbuster every time puts unhealthy pressure on creatives. The pressure on the filmmakers is so intense, I think it stifles the creativity.
