It’s a classic story, the idea of Romeo and Juliet has been around forever. However, trying to do it through the lens of a first-gen, second-gen experience, I thought was new.

This is a story for anyone that’s felt ostracized, or like they had to fit into society’s expectations or norms when they just wanted to be themselves.

Letting go, trusting, and going on that journey was so beautiful and magical. It was unlike anything else that I’ve ever done.

I think people imagine that, I don’t know, being me is some exciting, thrilling adventure or something. But I have a lot of very mundane problems and deal with a lot of issues that pretty much anybody deals with in life.

I don’t want to play it safe. I want to have big jokes, a big villain, and a joyful adventure with this likable family.

There are set pieces and moments from those books that I’ve visualized in my mind’s eye, that are unforgettable. And probably like any filmmaker, when you see something in your imagination, you get this burning hunger to make it real. To one day step onto a set with actors and shoot it.

All the stress and all the industry bullshit aside, and all the being away from home that comes with this, there is no greater job on the face of the Earth than the one that we have.

One big influence on me as far as form over function would be the Marble Hornets series, which was the YouTube series that started the Slender Man mythos. That always had an impact on me as far as telling a story via the medium, where the medium is the message.

What Guillermo and Mark Gustafson did was make a movie that is about human connection, and it doesn’t matter what medium that comes from. They’re telling a story and it just happens to be stop-motion.

No one is who they seem in this film, I think it’s fair to say. Everyone’s performing on some level. I think with Poe, it’s very overt because it’s quite clear that he’s in performance mode for a lot of it.

Art is necessary and cannot be made by machines. It is an expression of the soul and it’s the only type of art that I recognize as such.

When you see such a huge band in such a small place, like no huge production screens or anything, you can just listen to how the musicians play their instruments.

I wanted to give the feeling of physical pain through music.

How do I balance out the kind of prettiness of the melodic music – which I enjoy – with the kind of brute force of trying to get the orchestra to kind of play a metal riff, which I also love?

It was like filming a music video but on a much bigger level x100! There’s so much storytelling that goes into a music video, but a whole movie… it’s a much bigger scale.

One of the things about The Midnight Club is that it celebrates different storytellers; it’s baked into its DNA.

I’m a huge fan. He creates these brilliant universes, but I think what makes him special are his very human characters.

To me, the idea of using genre, even if it’s just thriller or something, feels truer to internal experience than something that’s a little bit more realistic.

There was not one extra frame that had the dog doing what it was supposed to do.