Gore Verbinski

“On a live-action movie, things happen that are unexpected. In animation, you have to fabricate the feeling. That takes a tremendous amount of nuance until the film becomes sentient and gives back.”

“There is a sense that animated movies are suddenly a genre. I just don't believe they are; it's a technique to tell a story.”

“I just watched so many Westerns as a kid that you end up using archetypes and sort of tropes of that genre, because there's a language there and you can twist it and turn it on its head or play to it or go sideways at any time.”

“I just think it's growth when you pursue something you're not sure you can do.”

“All the traditional westerns are about choice and the individual. When progress comes it's much more difficult to define the individual in that world.”

“I think people imagine going back to a time when they knew who they were and they knew what the circumstances were - if you screwed up it was your fault.”

“Honestly, every person, every individual has a process, and my philosophy, whether it's an actor or an animator, is you try to understand the process that person has so you can get the most out of them, but I think you have to sort of manipulate that process with honesty.”

“This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.”

“My respect for artists is very high. I think to get the most out of them, you have to liberate them. I think part of liberating them is saying, 'Come up with something brilliant, new, and fresh. Stop thinking based on what has been beat into you by executives or publishers in terms of what's going to work and what's not. Don't react, just act.'”

“I think comedy is drama, often. It's hard to have comedy over a period of time - commercials are one thing, but over a period of time - comedy and tragedy go hand in hand.”

“Everyone always wants to find the answer, to feel that things are resolved. But in dreams, maybe there isn't an answer so much.”

“If you imagine yourself as a craftsman at ILM, you spend your days tumbling buses and animating shards of glass. You're doing a lot of visual effects work.”

“When I speak of drama, I'm really referring to just 'desperately trying not to be ordinary'. Trying to get something that has a little bit of friction, conflict, absurdity.”

“Today we're just growing and consuming, and I think maybe there's a sadness in that. People are longing for a time when there was a black and white and good and bad.”

“Animation is a technique, not a genre.”

“Nothing's occurring in animation - you manufacture everything.”

“It's a mistake for Hollywood to impose themselves on the gaming space. Not only is it arrogant, but it hasn't really worked.”

“For me, some of the happiest moments on a live-action film are the awkward moments. One actor says something to another actor. They didn't expect that performance from that actor; that affects their return performance.”

“Animated films are so precisely engineered - right down to forming lines of dialogue with words pulled from several different takes - how do you translate that spontaneity from the live-action to the digital realm?”

“I just don't know when we all decided that if it doesn't fit in a Happy Meal box, it's not for kids. I remember flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, and I grew up watching Monty Python. I think that kids can handle a lot more than we give them credit for, especially when it comes to the absurd.”