"George Washington, probably, David Gordon Green’s first movie. That was one that I probably saw right before I started, or was it… I can’t remember — it might have been right before I wrote this film. I had never really seen kids articulated in the way that it felt like kids actually thought. It wasn’t imbuing the kids with a sort of ability to articulate themselves that was beyond them. There’s that amazing monologue when one of the boys is sitting on the floor of a bathroom and he’s looking up, and he’s saying, “I want to be an inventor. I want to make stuff,” and he’s giving this monologue about his wants and his needs, but they’re so through the prism of a young mind. You can tell the speeches he’s heard that he thinks he might be making, but in that dishonesty it’s so honest. He’s reaching for things beyond himself, and you feel that he doesn’t have the faculties to get there, and that’s just so honest of what that time is. You can feel that he really gave a lot of this sort of articulated authorship over to the kid and that really shows. It’s like, “Oh, this is actually how kids speak.”