The thing that I wanted to communicate most is the literalness of childhood, that idea, the magical sense that if you put a hat on your head, you believe yourself to have disappeared. If you’re playing a monster, you think you are scary, you’ve become a monster. The idea in Dodgeball that Freckleface can turn herself into a monster and, therefore, protect herself and then inadvertently scare another child, scare a child that seems impervious to fear of any kind, who seems like a tough kid.
You know, so
I like that exchange too that he’s able to say to her, “Hey, you’re scary.” And she has to say, “Hey, I’m not scary, I’m pretending.” You know, so that’s the idea that once again it’s about the largeness of it all, of the things that we might dismiss as grownups saying, “Oh, please it’s, you know, that’s just pretend. Don’t worry about it.” And yet everything in their world is pretend. It’s meaningful to them. So that’s kind of
Yeah, so it was really about for me growing up and being someone who read constantly and couldn’t — sometimes wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between what was happening in my book and what was happening in my life because I’d get too wrapped up in it and start to feel upset and anxious because whatever, you know, Laura Ingalls Wilder was going through in her book, you know. That they’re in the middle of a long winter and they’re twisting hay or whatever. And then I’d be like put the book down and be like, “Why am I so upset?” you know? So kids can
that kind of emotional influence I think is really interesting to me.
