So that’s sort of what the idea of being an American is to me. It’s that feeling of freedom and being able to do what you want, even if it’s not always perfect. And I guess that’s just who I’ve always been. I always thought it was the greatest honor in the world to be born in this country. I wouldn’t trade that for anything, even if I thought it was weird. Because it made me the person that I am today, and I wouldn’t change that. How has your mom helped you through the process of making this movie? She’s been my guiding light through this whole thing. As you know, everything in this movie comes from my imagination. But she was there through all the decisions, and helped me come up with ideas. In terms of the whole story, it really came from me, but I was really lucky to have a mom who was there supporting me through it. What was the deciding factor for you in deciding to go forward with the film? What made you feel that you couldn’t not do it? When you’re a young kid, like I was when I first wrote this, you always think you’re a lot smarter than you really are. It was only when I took time and was able to sit down and look back that I realized, “Wow, I never should’ve said this stuff.” It’s not a very good story, actually. [Laughs.] But it was still interesting to me that I could just keep making this story up. And it seemed so fun. In the movie, the characters in the story of “Mandy” are very self-serious and have huge egos. How hard was it to make Mandy fun? How did you go about making her a more relatable character? I didn’t want to make a character that was so serious that the movie didn’t work. So I wanted to give her a voice and make her real. And the only way to do that was by making her funny. I kind of wish that she wasn’t as funny as she is in the movie. I would’ve loved to have seen what she was like without the humor. What do you hope that kids will get out of the movie? I wanted kids to understand that kids are very different from each other. And everybody’s got their own story and their own set of feelings and their own thoughts. Even if it might be weird, you don’t have to fit in to one particular group or another. You can be whoever you want to be. It’s okay to go through your own stuff. I love the idea that there are many different paths that you can go down in life. I’ve always thought that America is very diverse. And I think that idea has always been prevalent in this film. My brother was saying the other day that the reason I started this story in the first place was because I was watching cartoons like Looney Tunes and Popeye and Road Runner and I would try to mimic their voices and stuff. And they all would imitate the other characters, so it was just me imitating other people. So that was sort of how it started, but now it’s kind of like a little twist on what I was trying to do back then. Was this your first time working with animation? This was my first time doing animation for an animated film. And were you nervous about it at all? I’m a big fan of animation. When you have animators on the team, I always think, “Oh wow, what they’re going to come up with is awesome.” That’s why when it came to the animation, I was like, “Yeah, let’s just have fun with it.” It’s something different that I’ve never done before. I’m glad I decided to do it. It was a lot of fun for me. I had a great time. What was the most important aspect of the job of creating the “Mandy” world, which took place almost exclusively in her head? It’s weird. I’ve never had an experience like that, where I could just imagine anything and it could turn out to be a story. It’s a very strange process. But at the same time, I kind of got used to the weirdness of it. I realized pretty early on that what would happen to Mandy was completely crazy, and then just accepting that and rolling with it, and not being ashamed of the things that she would say or do. It was really hard for me at first because the first draft was all her. The plot was all in her head, and she’s talking and making decisions that nobody else would make. I realized very early on that no one was going to think, “Oh my God, this is brilliant. This is the best story ever!” But I kept thinking, “Well, this is what I think is really interesting, so why don’t I just go with it?” Are there any scenes in the film that you wished you could take back? You can go back and try to do the original movie. I still see the movie that I made. There are things I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m so bad at animation.” There are so many things I would change in the movie. But at the same time, there are things that I love. I’m glad that there was something I was so bad at that has been sort of my Achilles heel, because otherwise the movie wouldn’t be what it is. How long did you do the animation before you were finished? It took me five months. We worked pretty fast. We’re all kind of shortsighted in terms of the timeline. We didn’t worry too much. And we took it in fits and starts. We would do a small little chunk every week or every two weeks. When you’re working on a computer, there’s no such thing as a timeline. We did a few things by deadline, because it was a real hurry, but most of the things that we did, we didn’t necessarily have a set deadline. If we were ahead, we would wait. We were almost always under budget. It just sort of goes to show you that you don’t have to have a set budget. We didn’t have any set budget. That way you have more freedom in terms of what you can do and how you can do it. Did you feel like the character of Mandy changed throughout the making of the film? I would say the main way the movie changed was her becoming more funnier. The other thing that changed was her being more of a character and not such an annoying person. And also the story changed. The story got a lot more complicated. She ended up meeting a lot of different people who were all messed up in different ways, and that was what made the story richer and complicated. It felt like a real story to me. Was it hard for you to keep the tone of the movie under control? The tone is one of the things I did keep on the agenda, and that’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to do an animated version of something. I would always want to make it a little more serious, but it felt like there was too much going on. One thing I always knew was that, in the original Mandy, the character Mandy is the narrator, so we wanted that to be the case with this movie. Because in this film, she’s trying to make the whole story come to life. She’s not narrating in the same way. We wanted it to be more of a character piece, but I thought that it needed to be this crazy, wild, funny thing. So it’s both the girl who’s in her head and the girl who gets all these people together and she’s the one who tells the story. How much control do you have over who reads the ending? It was a pretty tricky thing. I wanted to make sure that what happens at the end is the same no matter what, but I also wanted to find a way to make it true for everyone. I had a lot of mixed feelings about the ending. The way the end ended up in the movie, I think that it does do justice to who I am as a person. But that’s probably because you’re more complex than anyone. You don’t just have one tone or one feeling, but you do have a ton of different feelings and you’re not afraid to express it. So a lot of that shows in the movie. You see it through the story. You see it through the characters. That’s what you do in life. You see your feelings through the things you’re doing, but also through what you’re saying. And everyone else is like, “I know why he did this.” Or they see his whole story. You don’t always have to have all the answers to understand him. You can actually see Mandy’s feelings coming out in the way she responds to other characters. How did that develop? That comes from a lot of different things that I was thinking about in terms of the characters and Mandy and her world and all that. I tried to put myself in Mandy’s shoes. I would talk to Mandy about some of the problems that she has in real life.