In the beginning Ari Folman wrote a three-minute "pitch scene" to raise production funds -- the air terminal scene as it appears in the film. We had a really pressing timeframe: in a month and a half we had to come up with an approach that was affordable and served the story. Yoni Goodman, the director of animation and myself, we did it in three weeks. It came together, the technique and the aesthetics; it had to be on one hand simple and on the other very detailed. To find the balance between making something stylized, that still has the sense of truthfulness.

It's much easier to make dramatic scenes and compositions -- you look at a Tarantino film and you can immediately see the aesthetics of it. What we were trying to do in some places was get as far from that as possible. It's not trying to impress with draughtsmanship. For Ari's character here, for example, we were trying to get the right expression, to show his rebellious nature but that he's still quite compliant and a little bit depressed, all these mixed emotions.

Animating the film, there were two teams. I was responsible for drawing the images, the other animators were manipulating the drawings. Yoni Goodman came up with this technique of using Flash and Photoshop in a very complicated way. The thing is, we had these limitations and were trying to make the best of it, not to compete with these big studios. I personally did over 1700 drawings and I had three other people, Michael Faust, Ya'ara Buchman and Asaf Hanuka, working with me. It took three years but it wasn't that hard because the people were so delightful.