And there are a couple of clues, like you go into the kitchen and the refrigerator says, 'General Wholectric' on it, and a couple of utensils you see are skewed, a little warped, slightly Seussified, but they're of our world. He really meant it to be very much a kind of parallel universe. So, oddly enough, we drew our inspiration from that. Jim Carrey was a collaborator in the project from the outset. And he had a tremendous sense of why the world was funny and cool, and what he could do in that world.
Nobody is just an angry guy.
What we are is hurt, whether it's self-imposed or something happened to us. That made me able to make the Grinch sympathetic. That's how I approached it. This is a guy who wants to be invited to the party, but can't admit it to himself. They had a real functionality about them, but you didn't recognize them as being American or of this world.