“It’s not the most pleasant thing to force somebody to do it the way they don’t want to do it,” Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson says in response to gripes from dp Tristan Oliver (among other co-workers) about (a) having insisted on an unconventional approach to shooting the stop-motion feature and (b) on-set absentee-ism.

“In Tristan’s case, what I was telling him was, ‘You can’t use the techniques that you’ve learned to use. I’m going to make your life more difficult by demanding a certain approach,” Anderson tells correspondent Chris Lee. “The simple reality is [that] the movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it. I realized this is an opportunity to do something nobody’s ever seen before. I want to see it. I don’t want afterward to say, ‘I could have gone further with this.'”

For what it’s worth, if I were directing a stop-motion animation flick I’m not sure I’d want to hang out on the set for weeks and months on end, endlessly futzing with models.