The key thing is knowing how to adapt. Adapting to the group that you have at your disposal; adapting to the place where you're working; adapting to the local environment. This is crucial: adaptability.
I mean, there are many other directors who are probably both more skilled and excited to adapt novels or work within certain genre conventions. I'd like to do that kind of work someday, but for better or worse I'm too drawn by my own material.
However varied you try to make your work, you still bump up against the end of you. You keep knocking into a wall, and the wall is your own skull. But when you adapt somebody's work, it's like a door into somewhere else. It feels like a holiday from myself.
I'm not setting out to adapt books and work with books, but when really amazing stories come to you in that form, it's really hard to turn away from that.
When I work on my own stuff - and I think this is true for anybody - but when you work on something that you just completely own, you are trying to stay as true to your own storytelling voice as you can.
Going to work is probably my favorite thing to do. I do that five days a week for probably ten hours a day, but it doesn't even feel like work and it shouldn't. When you enjoy a job so much like I do, it's not work, it's play.
I don't work with a stylist, I don't work with a glam squad to get me together for the red carpet, I really enjoy the time it takes to do it myself, to choose my clothes and do my own makeup and my own hair.
When you work with a major label they create their own message for you and a lot of the time that works great, or at least it did back in the 90's but now it doesn't work, so I think as an artist if you learn your own business, like anybody would when they want to start a little restaurant - they'd figure it out and then build it and they work hard - then it could be your own little business that you grew to as big as you want it to be but you had much more control with how to communicate it and how it's cared for.
The reality is that the work I do is not private work. I bring all my secrets, my life, to my work. Anybody who's seen my work knows everything about me.
No one forces me, or any other writer, to sell a film option on the books. If you don't want to run the risk that the filmmakers may adapt your work in a way you don't like, then you don't sell the option. You know when you sell it that they will have to make some changes, just because film and TV are different media than books.
There are loads of novels that I really love, like Haruki Murakami's books, and when I read them, I do think about how they would work as an anime. But I do believe that those are great books because they work best as novels, or great manga work best in that form.
When I was 4, I had a schedule. I was playing softball. My brother was playing football. My parents were teachers, and they'd owned businesses. We like to work hard. Work and then books. Books and then work. We just knew that we had to excel. It sounds militant, but trust me, it was fun.
I work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.
Personally, I really enjoy sci-fi. I watch it, I read comic books, and I play video games. I love this kind of world, so to be able to work in it is a dream. I enjoy it.
I never considered myself more able than anybody because I had problems just like anybody else. When I practiced, I solved problems, like any of my fellow students. I looked at my own work, and looked ahead, with blinders, almost.
Personally, I really enjoy sci-fi. I watch it, I read comic books, and I play video games. I love this kind of world, so to be able to work in it is a dream. I enjoy it. It's all good.