You need pencil miles to be a great artist, animator, or filmmaker, and the sooner you start making mistakes, the quicker you learn.
We try to stay as open-minded about casting as possible. When you're getting things down on paper, you might even avoid writing down a name, let alone if they have blonde hair or this or that, to stop.
It was kind of fun to make 'Cloudy,' which has such a stylized look, and then do 'LEGO,' which, while it's stylized, is also photo-real.
That might be my epitaph: 'It wasn't as bad as I thought. Here lies Phil Lord.'
I'm a big believer in the transformative, exponential power of art, like a reverse pyramid scheme.
I think we're going to be very embarrassed in a few years when we see a lot more women film-makers. People will look back and ask, 'How did it take so long for you to figure this out?'
The hardest thing to do with an animated movie is to not make it feel synthetic: to feel like it's handmade, where you can sense the human hand in it.
As the son of a Cuban refugee and cousin and nephew to many Cubans on the island, I cringe when Americans visit Cuba for a fun island vacation.
'Zorn' goes to some pretty ridiculous places, but the real comedy is coming from these little observations about life that are not as outlandish as some of the bigger moves in the story. This is a guy who has magical relics and fights weird monsters and is also dealing with very basic work and family things.
