My profession is about as far away from growing up in southern Illinois as you can get.

A dream job is to walk right past hair and makeup.

I gravitated back to theatre again, and when I heard about this little independent movie called 'Lady Bird,' I thought, 'This will be a project where I can dip my toe back into the water.'

I'm not trying to blow out a camera lens or make the audience's hair go straight back from my sheer volume, sheer energy level.

In live-action, writing, production, and editing happen in discrete stages. In animation, they overlap - happening simultaneously. This allows a real dialogue to occur between the writer, the director, the actors, and the editor, and it makes the writing process a lot more collaborative and a lot less lonely.

Most of the songs I write are just very directly from my life. I don't have a big imagination. Whenever I tried to write from fantasy, it comes out sounding really fake.

When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone - it's possible. But creatively, it's more like painting: you can't just use the same colours in every painting. It's just not an option. You can't take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.

My imagination is so far out there already. People couldn't imagine what goes on in my brain.