I've found that the people who play villains are the nicest people in the world, and people who play heroes are jerks. It's like people who play villains work out all their problems on screen, and then they're just really wonderful people.
I get so tired of people saying, 'Oh, you only make fantasy films and this and that', and I'm like, 'Well no, fantasy is reality', that's what Lewis Carroll showed in his work.
When I was growing up, Dr. Seuss was really my favorite. There was something about the lyrical nature and the simplicity of his work that really hit me.
I don't know what it was, maybe the movie theaters in my immediate surrounding neighbourhood in Burbank, but I never saw what would be considered A movies.
People told me I couldn't kill Nicholson, so I cast him in two roles and killed him off twice.
I never really got nightmares from movies. In fact, I recall my father saying when I was three years old that I would be scared, but I never was.
I used to have a phone machine that you turn 'on' and 'off,' which was great. Now, it's so technological that it's like going down the rabbit hole.
A lot of things you see as a child remain with you... you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.
People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.
I keep thinking I'm going to miss it back in Los Angeles. But I don't. The only thing I miss is driving out in the desert in the Southwest.
It's good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way.