(He proudly displays a sketch of a short kid with a backwards baseball cap, shaggy hair and shifty, oversized eyes.)

A: See that? It looks just like me when I was a kid. I've noticed that you can often see a lot of a person in their style of drawing. When I first met John Lasseter, I realized that he looks EXACTLY like Buzz Lightyear! He, of course, had no idea what I was talking about.

Q: All right, first things first. The man behind Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn decides to make a kiddie flick. Have you gone soft on us or what?

A: Actually, I think all of my films are basically the same at heart. I think Spy Kids definitely reflects my own particular sense of humor, as well as my love for gadgets and toys. In fact, if you hadn't seen any of my movies, I'd actually tell you to see Spy Kids first, because it would probably give you a better sense of what I'm about and the kind of comedy that's at work in my other films. Because really, when you get right down to it, what do you have in Desperado? A bunch of guys firing rockets out of guitar cases and stuff. A lot of people watch From Dusk Till Dawn and don't know whether they should be laughing or not. Spy Kids is obviously my least violent film, but then my approach to violence has always been pretty cartoonish and over-the-top, so it's really not that different.