"It’s an interesting choice, yeah. You wouldn’t necessarily associate it with this. But if you think about ParaNorman, one of the things that, from the beginning, we realized we wanted was to create a real place — a real sense of place — and really hold up a mirror to the contemporary world and not create a fantasy American town. We wanted to really believe in it. And it was already in the script that [the movie’s fictional town] Blithe Hollow would be rotten around the edges and not a perfect place. We love imperfection; it’s throughout — even the family in the story are imperfect. So what was really cool about watching George Washington — and looking at the photography by William Eggleston, by the way — was just how the kind of downbeat world was celebrated, though great cinematography and great photography. And in George Washington, a lot of it’s just about the sense of place. It really takes time developing a sense of place with great photography and sound. So in our first act, when we introduce Norman’s world and the town of Blithe Hollow, especially when he’s walking to school, we actually put shots in there that normally wouldn’t belong in an animated movie — not a Western animated movie. Just shots of odd corners of the world that are kind of run down. Not necessary, but they kind of create atmosphere. We love that kind of vibe. Early on, Chris had tried a little bit of [composer] Jon Brion’s music [as a temp score] — and it had that same kind of slightly off-beat vibe to it, and we wanted to have that vibe to this world at the beginning. Then when we introduce the fantasy elements, it’s a real contrast."

"I chose a live album because you can hear where East meets West. It's obvious Ravi's known for his traditional music with Indian instruments. But with Inside The Kremlin he has the strings going. He's got a very orchestrated formality to mix in with his own Indian-tempered scale melodies. You can also hear the giant strings very clearly, so for me this is heaven. You've got the Indian modality mixed in with classical music. It's part of where we learned to orchestrate - where you can hear the sitars, for instance. It didn't take long for us to think, hey, this is how you put a cool guitar, strings or oboe piece together! Before that - and the same happened on Ocean Rain by Echo & The Bunnymen - it was the first time in a long time that we began to suss out this orchestration thing; it's not rocket science! I know the composers seem like they're physicists but if we can just take the melodies we can already play on the guitar and we put them on these classical instruments, that's orchestration, isn't it? We didn't have to be Mozart to do this. But in my case, this is where I began to figure some of these things out, certainly with Ocean Rain and Ravi Shankar. When I was in The Flaming Lips making the In A Priest Driven Ambulance album, it was very similar in that there was a guitar melody, but there were also strings doing it. That led to the beginnings of the orchestration in Mercury Rev as well as Flaming Lips. Listen to Ravi Shankar, and then listen to modern Bollywood - that's the Western or Hollywood side of Eastern music."