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I love animals and I love to see movies with animals that are done respectfully, you know?

There's something really interesting about how human beings just want to see animals tear each other apart, maybe because we can't do it.

I can watch endless humans get killed, but if I see a movie and they kill a dog, I practically want to walk out.

I just don't think I've had the desire yet to write a vicious animal - like a dog-gone-bad or anything - where I do feel that I need a balance of all types of humans.

I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.

I grew up in a family of filmmakers, so I always wanted to make films about animals, especially comical films. Something about animals amuses me. And they have a great mystery. It's the same mystique some people might feel looking at the stars or the ocean.

It seems natural to surround my fictional world with animals because my reality is full of them. When I'm sitting there conceiving a story, they just pop up.

I'm not a big one for lots of genitals flapping in the films.

My purpose is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness.

One of the magical things about these anthropomorphic animal movies is that we can take things that are so common in our own world that we deal with, like the DMV, or moving to a new city, or our family, and show you a mirror image of those things, reflected in a whole new way. That's why animals are great.