Americans like the British kind of quirkiness and the strange accent. They find it kind of cute or something, with a certain charm.

I'm always there at home thinking of Wallace and Gromit ideas.

Gromit was the name of a cat. When I started modeling the cat I just didn't feel it was quite right, so I made it into a dog because he could have a bigger nose and bigger, longer legs.

But I think people see 'Wallace and Gromit' as something akin to an elderly couple. These two know each other so well. Nothing can split them apart.

I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.

If you respect the audience enough, they can take onboard many things.

My father, an architectural photographer, was an incurable tinkerer, maker and mender.

There is something about the Australian psyche that seems to like films that are slightly offbeat.

We can do things that we never could before. Stop-motion lets you build tiny little worlds, and computers make that world even more believable.

We have to look forward and keep filming new films and not get stuck in the past.

After studying in Sheffield, I went down to London to do my post-graduate degree at the National Film and Television School, embarking on the movie that would eventually become 'A Grand Day Out.'

I have to admit to not being the greatest technician, but stop motion animation gives me licence to create machines that wouldn't otherwise be possible - inventions that seem real and actually work.

Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.

When we first sold the Wallace and Gromit shorts to America, people suggested we get rid of the strange British accents and put clear American voices on them, and we held out.

With some CGI, I think the brain slightly perceives that things aren't real. There's no gravity, the light's not quite real, the shadows aren't quite real.