My father was a painter, and he did paintings that were exhibited in galleries in New York on 57th Street. He was out of a mainstream of American art in the 1940s and '50s, which was heading toward and deeply involved in abstract expressionism. He was a... He painted realistically, and what you might call intimate still lifes of enigmatic mechanical objects, for the most part. But to support himself... he didn't make enough money, selling these paintings, to support a family of two kids and a wife, and living in New York. So he also did some commercial illustration. He did covers for Scientific American, and Fortune Magazine, and other things for department stores.

And I remember him... When I was five, I think, he brought home some props. He'd been decorating some windows for one of the department stores, and he brought home some props from the window, which were little wooden butterflies, that, I guess, were hanging at the end of threads, as if they were real butterflies. But they were little pieces of plywood, painted... that he had painted in butterfly shapes. And I loved them. And I got excited about them, and coerced my... two or three of my friends to work with me on a butterfly factory. And we were going to take these wooden butterflies, and trace the outlines on pieces of paper, and then cut the pieces of paper around the outlines, and then colour in the butterflies with colours of our own design, and it would be a paper butterfly. And this, in the end, occupied the better part of a day. I saw it going on for weeks and months. I was going to be the butterfly king of the neighbourhood. But my friends, their interest in it was limited. And I organised it according to some kind of assembly line. I'll do the tracing, you do the colouring, you do the cutting, and that's how we will work.

And I think of that frequently when I think about what it is that I do today, that the editing room is, in a sense, a kind of butterfly factory, that we're taking these templates and colouring them in, and cutting them out, and exhibiting them on a kind of assembly line. There's me, and my assistant, and other helpers, obviously. The director, who is, sort of, dad. But the feeling that I get, I mean, it doesn't sustain... You know, examining it overly much as an analogy, but the feeling that I have when I'm in an editing room, I can, kind of, very easily trace back to the feeling I had in the butterfly factory, and I really liked it. And I like that environment, where everyone had a job to do, and it was clear how it was organised, and yet there was an artistic side to it. It was an interpretative artistic side. We weren't creating these butterflies, we were remaking them. So there's some indication there, in embryo, of some sensibility, because it was very easy to imagine kids who had absolutely no interest in butterfly factories – as was proven by the two people I was trying to get to help me – they worked at it for a couple of hours, and then they didn't like it anymore. Luckily, in film, you can find people who like... you know, who are similar, like the butterfly factory. But it's also a general principle that has to do with: what is your inner sensibility, and how do you express that in life?