Q: The entire film industry is rushing to funnel content to everything from cell phones to wristwatches. How did you become the chief proponent of old-fashioned big-screen spectacles?
A: It’s not against my religion that our product find its way onto those devices, but yes, I have grown up on and I love the movie-theater experience. When several hundred people get into a room and the lights go down—and it doesn’t matter whether it’s an action movie or a scary movie or a comedy—there is an amazing chemistry that occurs when people have a shared experience of watching a great movie. They come with such optimism, every time, that they’re going to get a great experience. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t, but they come in ready to love.

Q: There are morals in a lot of your movies—in Shrek, that beauty’s not skin deep; in this month’s Kung Fu Panda, that a belief in yourself can transform your life.
A: Movies are fables. I learned the lesson from Walt Disney—I still consider myself a student of his to this day—to have at the core of a movie something that relates to the trials and tribulations that we have in our lives. And you know, it doesn’t cost us any more to do that.

Q: And Madagascar had an autobiographical element to it—it had a lot to do with your growing up near the zoo.
A: Well, as a kid I loved visiting the Central Park Zoo in New York—it was an amazing place, and I always remember being so impressed with how pampered and well looked after and taken care of the animals seemed—at least to me as a little kid. They got to live right off of Fifth Avenue, and they ate only the finest red meat. So the movie was sort of an imagining of what would happen if these pampered New Yorkers, because that’s what the animals represented to me, actually had to go back to the wild.

Q: Speaking of survival, at Disney you wrote the famous memo rebuking the movie business for forgetting its mission. Do you feel a similar urgency now?
A: No, I see this as a moment of tremendous opportunity. For the first time in 70 years there’s an innovation as transformational as when movies went from black-and-white to color: 3-D animation. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Jim Cameron, Bob Zemeckis, Peter Jackson—all of them are working in 3-D. They are the alphas of our tribe, and when all the alphas start to move, it’s probably a good idea to follow.

Q: That’s pretty good advice. Did anyone ever give you any words of wisdom?
A: At Paramount, Barry Diller told me you need to have the right to fail in order to succeed. Most great successes come from doing things that are original and unique and therefore risky. Starting DreamWorks with Steven [Spielberg] and David [Geffen] was obvious in terms of opportunity and at the same time a pretty crazy idea, in that no one had started a movie studio in 65 years—at least not successfully.