I'm a lover of the great adventure films of the 1980s: 'Goonies,' 'E.T.,' 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' 'Star Wars.'

In animation, there's not a medium I believe that's more collaborative. It is a team of people, of different disciplines, coming together. The decisions are made by consensus in many cases. My job as a director is to exercise the best judgement I can in terms of which decision is the best one to make for the movie.

The Smurfs - and they're this way in Peyo's comics as well - do have a rubbery indestructibility about them. They can get bruised & battered. But they then just sort of bounce back very quickly, like those classic cartoon characters Wiley Coyote and Tom & Jerry.

Animation tends to have several different writers who serve different functions. I think, on a lot of animated features, there are a lot of writers who don't get credited. It's the policy at Disney, for instance, in deciding who gets credit. It depends on the writer's contract, so many things.

If you get to No 1, people say, 'But you didn't win a Grand Slam.' You cannot win, because you can say the same the other way round. In my opinion, both are really important. If you want to finish your career really happy with what you did, you have to win both.

I knew when my career was over. In 1965 my baseball card came out with no picture.

Very difficult to understand American audience, what they like, what they don't like. Some movie I like very much, it doesn't work. Some movie I don't like, it gets big box office. Very difficult.

My father - a Lebanese-origin small businessman - had a stroke in 1997 and couldn't work anymore. I paused my career and made sure he was taken care of by overseeing the sale of his businesses, but after that, I was able to dedicate myself to politics. It's what I had always wanted.