Daniel Handler

Daniel: Book thirteen marks the return of a reptile previously gone missing.

Daniel: Watch Your Mouth.

Daniel: People can expect poisonous mushrooms. And then only if they open the book.

Daniel: I don't know whether it's digital effects or if they trained a baby to bite through steel. I'm not sure what method was used.

Daniel: I was interested in finding ways to do dark comedy that were actually dark and comic.

Daniel: And she has a fairly consistent political agenda. She's a baby, so individual liberty is a developing idea in her psyche.

Daniel: The way Sunny speaks in the books seems a perfect fit for the cause in question. She often uses words that can't be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, which then are explained as sly commentary on what's going on around her.

Daniel: A nice thing about children's books, though I'm probably alone in this opinion among people who write and publish them, is that they did get to be in this unrecognized ghetto for a long time.

Daniel: It's full of depressing details about the children's lives, and I'm sorry to say, it's the longest in the series. So in terms of total misery, it's quite a lot to deal with well, both in terms of the number of pages and the amount of misery per page.

Daniel: For most people, the two primary relationships they have are with their families or romantic ones. And everyone knows those two relationships have a lot to do with one another.

Daniel Handler: (About A Series of Unfortunate Events) Well, for a while, it seemed like it was going to be the most exciting motion picture ever made, and then there was a huge changing of the guard in which I was more or less fired as a screenwriter, and the producer quit, and the director was either fired or quit, depending on whom you ask. If you ask him, he says he was fired. So then for a while it looked like it was going to be the worst movie ever made, hopelessly embarrassing, and by the time it was finishing up, I was so grateful that it wasn't the worst movie ever made that I overlooked many things that might have otherwise upset me.

Daniel Handler: (On playing in bands) Our Gypsy tango version of "When Doves Cry" was our biggest hit. But we were not destined for greatness.

Daniel Handler: What was fun about putting Rick together is that it got put together at the same moment that Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events was getting put together, so I would be in one part of New York, in a meeting about how they were going to build a lake indoors, and then I would take the subway down to another part of New York, where we would talk about the fact that if it snowed that night there would be snow in the movie, and if it didn't, there wouldn't. And I also wished that I could steal a tiny portion of the budget for the Lemony Snicket movie, like the budget for the lunches that we had, and put that money in a sack and take it downtown and give it to the production of Rick. So the two experiences were about as far apart as you could be and still be in the same medium. With Rick, the actors were all making enormous sacrifices to be in the film. Just looking at Bill Pullman changing clothes behind a screen in the corner of a rented hotel meeting room was fascinating, and then to go to the opposite end of the country where they were filming the Snicket movie, and watch Jim Carrey in a ring of trailers-one where he works, and one where he got dressed, and one where he got makeup on, in this sort of Wild West arrangement on the parking lot of the Paramount lot... It was fascinating. And then, also, everyone involved in the production of Rick didn't want to change anything-sometimes, I think, maybe even to the film's detriment. While in the Snicket movie, everyone had an opinion, and all the content was constantly in flux, and I often can't remember which scenes are and aren't in the final product, because I saw so many different versions of the movie that I forget which ended up on the cutting-room floor.