Phil Lord

“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.”

“You need to make things and not be so precious about whether they're any good or not. Because I have a secret for you: they're not good. They're flawed, and you need to find out what the flaws are as fast as possible.”

“It's easy to forget that when you take out all the shark stuff, 'Jaws' is a really beautiful human drama.”

“One of the things that has proven true in our career is that even if you take something that's as straightforward and classic as a father-son story, you can express it in a way that's totally unique to you.”

“I'm a big believer in the transformative, exponential power of art, like a reverse pyramid scheme.”

“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.”

“We are so aware of how silly our movies are as we're making them.”

“You can't play not to lose. You kind of have to put your ego aside and accept the fact that careers are long, and there's gonna be stuff people like and stuff that people don't like, and you try to get better every time, and always put something out that you're proud of. And let the chips fall where they may.”

“I don't want to fail by being conservative; I want to fail by doing something no one has ever done.”

“Male relationships are deeply emotional and hard to talk about.”

“I'm a big 'Omega Man' fan because of how insane he seems, just driving around in that car really fast. It has, like, a very strange tone to it.”

“I apologize for the song 'Everything Is Awesome.'”

“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.”

“I wish we had fewer bad words in 'Jump Street.' That would probably be better.”

“You need pencil miles to be a great artist, animator, or filmmaker, and the sooner you start making mistakes, the quicker you learn.”