They're not that far off. (Laughs) No, actually, people think I make kids’ movies and do a 180 degree turn from that, but it's not like I do any Shorts and Seven; it's more like Shorts and Desperado, and these things with guitar cases that shoot missiles. They're very much from the cartoonist's hand. I used to be a cartoonist, so the common thing in all my movies is they're all fantasies. They're all made-up worlds. They all have a lot of humor. So, it's a different kind of action, more of a comic book feel. But there's still a difference. I find making movies like Grindhouse or Sin City that are still very creative and fun, and then these movies take advantage of my family experiences, because I grew up in a family of ten kids. I have five kids, and people say as a writer if you want to write a book or a script, write what you know. So I have to do these, because that's what I know. It would be robbing myself of all this time spent with my kids to not utilize some of those experiences and those ideas that we come up with just playing and not put it somewhere.

What aspect of your childhood is inherent in this movie?

Well, those are more of the Spy Kids movies. In these, this is more of my life with my own children. These past few movies have been based on that. I mean, just directly, we had a canyon full of snakes there in our house and our property. We have a castle turret part of the house that I built, thinking ten years ago when I built it that someday I was going to use it as a set for a movie when I had kids, with my kids, and it ended up happening with this movie. I was going to shoot it kind of like El Mariachi, just in my backyard, and come up with a storyline later. So, when my son came up with the idea to do a Little Rascals type of movie, I was like, ‘Of course.’ That's something I had thought of doing years ago, and I totally forgot about it.

My son Rebel talked about the canyon and a rock. He loves rocks, collects rocks. He kept saying, ‘A rainbow rock, a rainbow rock.’ So I thought, ‘What if it's a wishing rock?’ And I asked him what he would wish for if he could wish for anything, because I was going to test the idea on them, and he said, ‘I would wish for a butt for a head.’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ So I asked my other son, who is older and wiser, what he would wish for, and he said, ‘I would wish to be a potato.’ And I said, ‘Hmm. Okay I'd wish for a million more wishes.’ And then their faces kind of dropped, like, ‘Oh’. You could tell they were thinking, ‘I just wasted my wish’ (laughs) and I realized this is a great idea for a movie because you get a rock and it can make you have anything. You wouldn't really know what to wish for, especially a kid. One kid wishes for chocolate, and now he's got stuff shooting out of his pockets. And let's wish for ‘telephonesis.’ And, of course, he says the word wrong, and everything's taken literally. You can just have a lot of fun, so it just became a process where me and my kids over the course of a couple of years would just be sitting around the dinner table and be thinking of ideas, or they would come up with ideas on their own. What if he's trying to keep the rock away from the kids at one point, and he asks for long arms and his arms go really high, and then another girl crawls up like a spider and grabs it. She's invisible, and she takes off, and she hides in a toaster and the toaster goes jumping around. If an idea worked, I'd write it down. If it didn't, I would forget about it.

I just grew up with them. I was third oldest in a family of ten kids. I do have a very vivid memory of an only child friend of mine coming over in high school on a Saturday, and he was just bugging out. And I said, ‘What's up?’ And he's like, ‘How can you stand the noise?’ And I was, ‘What noise?’ And I listened with his ears for a moment. I got real quiet. I was like, ‘Oh yeah. I guess it is noisy in here.’ (Laughs.) I just grew up this way. I don't actually hear it, you know? You actually don't hear it.

James Spader is in the film, and he’s an actor who is known for roles that are kind of internal, and you're telling him, ‘No, bigger. Louder. Open wide!’ Is that a process that you have to go through to get people to go farther over the top than they’re used to?

Yeah. He knows I'm in close, I mean, the camera's right there. Close. He's just like, ‘I don't know’. That's why you have a director. You're just trusting them. And you know what feels right and you know where you usually go in your comfort zone, and you're just like, ‘I don't know, do I go here?’ And I tell him, ‘I'm the editor. It's going to be fun. Let's go watch.’ And that's what's so much fun about shooting digital is you've got a big monitor, very clear. It's not like when you usually shoot film; you can't tell what you're doing. That's usually what he's shot on before, and so he can come over and see in crisp detail exactly what you're going to see. And he was howling. He just couldn't believe it. He just didn't know that it was reading that way. It looked great.

He was really surprised that it would be possible for him to finish shooting this in five days. How do you achieve that? Has technology reached the point where that is even more possible now than it was when you did your first digital movie, Spy Kids?

No, actually, that was pretty quick, too. (Laughs.) I mean, the thing is, what's very important is, I'm my own editor. The more jobs you do, the easier it gets, and that sounds kind of crazy. It's more like, ‘All right. We're going to do a big movie. Let's get more people.’ But my way is to say, ‘No, you need to get less people. You'll actually finish the race instead of just having a heart attack before you get across the line, because otherwise, you're carrying all this extra baggage with you.’ And, so, if you just think of the process, if you're just the director and you don't know anything about editing, and you're just shooting shots for the editor to figure out, well, then, you're going to be getting a close-up. Then you're going to be getting a medium shot. Then you’re going to be getting an overhead shot. What else can we do? Well, let's get an over-the-shoulder. Let's get an under-the-shoulder. Well, you just wasted a whole three days shooting something that could have taken ten minutes if the editor was right there. And if the editor is the same person, even easier. So you're watching a performance and you go, ‘You know what, I got that. That's what I'm going to use. Let's move on.’

And, in fact, I can already tell. Because this is a big party; you don't have to be there during the whole party. I'll just film your scenes, and then I'll make it look with the editing like they're actually looking and talking to you and watching you talk, even though I'm not going to film them for three more weeks. And it's going to look pretty seamless because I'm also the guy lighting it, so I'll light it so that it looks like it's the same light. So, nobody else will remember quite that that's where you had the lights, but I'll remember, because I'm the one doing it. So you save a tremendous amount of time, and it's just a very efficient approach to making a movie.

Oh, thanks. That took a while, yeah. With Jolie [Vanier], this is her first movie.

How did you find them and then direct them?

It's not real difficult to find kids. I mean, I have a really great casting agent. She brings in a bunch of kids. She brings me only the best ones of the best, and then you watch and you can see the ones that you spark to, and then you kind of find places for them. You shuffle them around. I really wanted to use Loogie [Trevor Gagnon]. He read for every part, and I couldn't quite figure out the character, and then I finally just made him Loogie. And then Jake Short, who plays the one with the long hair slicked back, Nose Noseworthy, he came in for every part. I knew I needed to put him in. His name was even Short, (laughs) that's his name, Jake Short. And I thought, he's destined to be in this movie somewhere. And I couldn't fit him in anywhere. And finally the last person to be cast was that kid.

And he showed up one day for an audition with his hair slicked back, because he looks like this surfer kid. He's just so cool, but he made himself a nerd and put on glasses. So I said, ‘Okay. You get the part because you're being creative and trying to play outside the box.’ And then you work with them after that, and you already know they're able to do it, and it's just going to be a day-to-day thing where you work with them scene by scene, line by line.

There aren’t a lot of very crass jokes in the movie. Is there a certain level of taste that you want to maintain when you're doing kids' movies?

No. (Laughs) It just turns out that way. I like a good fart joke, but I think there's so much other humor to be had. I think that one of the better reviews that I think Roger Ebert gave for Spy Kids was that it was at a time when there really weren't any kids' movies being made. Nobody was really taking it seriously. It was always, like, kids needed to see something. Let's just make something really quick and put it out there. So, they weren't expecting something like Spy Kids where it's like, ‘Wow. Somebody actually looked like they wanted to make a family film.’ The review said something, ‘In this age, it's about what you can get away with instead of what you can aspire to,’ so it was a really good affirmation that that was a good route to go—to try to just make a good movie. I think the other ways were just ways to just kind of throw in the kitchen sink. We just want people laughing in the theater and we don't have anything else to do, so let's just entertain. Anything we can do to just get a laugh, just to make the kids laugh, then the parents will feel like they took their kids out to have a good time.