Walking in stop-motion animation is probably the most difficult thing you can do... The way that they have these puppets connect to the set is they actually drill a hole in the set, and they put a threaded rod up through that hole and screw it into the bottom of their foot, and that keeps them in place.

I literally said it was my dream in life to direct a Charlie Kaufman movie.

I'm doing a music video for a group called 'Die Antwoord.' That's fun, but yeah, I'm trying to get a live-action film off the ground, and that could take anywhere from a few months to the rest of my life.

Movement and physics: These are the fundamentals of animation. You don't notice that stuff if it's done well, but if fabric or liquid or hair moves weird, your brain is like, 'Wait, that's not real.'

My parents broke many rules, so I guess thinking 'outside the box' has been slowly but surely developing in my family - one generation to the next.

I was born in 1937, in Yakima, Washington, the oldest child of Robert Emerson Lucas and Jane Templeton Lucas. My sister Jenepher was born in 1939 and my brother Peter in 1940. My parents had moved to Yakima from Seattle to open a small restaurant, The Lucas Ice Creamery.

In my Scandinavian-American family, we were conditioned never to sit, at least not comfortably. I was endlessly going back to work. We longed for the fleeting respite of being useful and regarded sleep as a reward for exhaustion, always to be deferred until after the sun goes down.

All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.