There’s a lot of well-deserved applause for the entirely hand-crafted approach to this film. There’s a brilliant blink-and-you-miss-it moment where Prue and Mac pass by an art fair in St. Johns, and a craftsperson selling their wares has a sign at their table saying to get human-made art “before it’s gone for good.” For this film, did you look to Portland’s own craft and visual arts culture for inspiration?

That’s part of the way I look at the world, and it’s where our community is from. That particular sign is a visual gag, but it’s also something that you would see in Portland. I also think it is a meaningful statement that is relevant to the film and to our culture at large. There is a huge maker community in Portland. It’s a group of people that actually celebrates handcrafted things, and that really is what’s beating at the heart of the movie, that the film is a celebration of human creativity, of human innovation, of the human touch, and in a world that’s often designed to be frictionless, easier, and automated. I think the human touch is something that’s special and deserves to be celebrated and deserves to be preserved.

Stop motion is such a deliberate practice, where every wrinkle is quite literally sculpted. As a director, are there specific details about a place that you gravitate towards or like to use as launch points?

I think when you’re approaching a story, you really want to listen to what the story wants to tell you. When I think about Kubo and the Two Strings, I go back to my own experiences when I was exposed to Japan for the first time. I was eight years old with my father, and it was a world unlike anything that I’d ever seen before. It left a huge impact on me, and those were the types of things that I was channeling. When I was making Bumblebee, I thought back to my experience of being exposed to the Transformers cartoons for the very first time. So you start putting these things through your own prism, and with Wildwood, it was very simple because it was the part of the world that I know better than anywhere. Settings, they have their own personality. Ultimately, what is driving all of these things is the theme and the emotion underneath it, and that is the thing that everything else needs to spiral out of. So, in the end, that’s really the thing I think about more than anything else: what is the story trying to say, and what is the emotion that we’re trying to convey?