GR: Were you aware of what the other animators were doing for The Animatrix? PC: Because I got involved in the project late, I was able to see the other episodes in storyboard form. The films hadn't been finished, but I was able to see what they were about and what styles they were using. None of us directors had Reloaded or Revolution to go by. We only had the first movie. As interesting as the first movie is, it's still a limited idea. I think that resulted in the episode I made. I didn't want to repeat what other people had been doing. I felt like a lot of the stories were treading on the same ground and I wanted to do something radically different.

GR: Your hallucinogenic scenes that take place in the mind of a robot are very different than the more traditional landscapes of the other segments. PC: You're talking about the mindscape in my film. The idea was to create something that flows the way dreams flow. It has a logic that is different than how things happen in the real world. Also, I wanted to contrast that with a simulation that would be created by a computer, which is what we see in The Matrix. I wanted to create something that could only have been imagined by the human mind. GR: Was it difficult to turn an abstract concept into concrete images? PC: To me, that's the whole point of animation: to create something that you can't go out and film in the real world. I have no interest in using animation to imitate live action movies. It's just not an interesting use of the medium. Oddly enough, if you look at a lot of experimental animated films - particularly computer-animated films - a lot of the imagery generated by the programs that people have developed coincide with that kind of hallucinogenic imagery. I'm not sure exactly what the connection is. Maybe there's something inherent about how the mind works that resembles the way a computer generates images? It was very much a discovery process. GR: A lot of CGI, like Andy Jones' "Last Flight of the Osiris," seems to blur animation and live-action filmmaking. PC: I don't see the point of doing that. With computer animation, the closer you get to reality, the more people notice the deficiencies‹the more they notice that it's not reality. To me, filmmaking is about trying to convey the world inside the mind and not the world. It's going inside the mind and trying to reproduce the thought process, not events as you witness them in the real world. That's part of my general theory about filmmaking. Filmmaking is always going to be at a disadvantage to literature if it limits itself to portraying the physical world. A lot of people have this idea that film is inherently more limited than books in telling a story because you can't go inside the mind of the characters. But I disagree. Film should not be limited like that. Filmmakers should be free to go inside the minds of the characters. GR: You've worked with the French illustrator Moebius. What sort of things did you learn from him? PC: A lot! I would call his approach to storytelling descriptive. In other worlds, he let his subjects speak for themselves. He's not into creating some kind of distorted style for the sake of it. His style is very clear and matter-of-fact, which was a big inspiration for me because it really emphasizes content rather than style. He talks about striving for neutrality in his portrayal of the Zen. In traditional American animation, the idea is to caricature everything. I've always felt limited by that. I'm not sure why caricature in animation is considered a good thing whereas in live action or theater it would be criticized.

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