In 1992, while promoting "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York," legendary director John Hughes, who died Thursday of a heart attack at the age of 59, spoke to MTV News about how he wound up specializing in iconic teen flicks like "Pretty in Pink" and later kid-friendly movies, like "Home Alone."

Hughes recalled that as he was finishing up his John Candy/ Macaulay Culkin movie, "Uncle Buck," he realized that he liked the kids' voice in the movie. "I always took the teenage point-of-view [earlier], and when I did 'Uncle Buck,' I took the uncle, Candy's point-of-view. And while doing that ... I really had fun working with a boy," he said of Culkin, who was 9 when "Uncle Buck" came out. "That's an age group I had never worked with.

"I just remembered what it's like to be 9, and it's just kind of an interesting area, so I had the idea for 'Home Alone,' " he continued. "Mac could be good for it, and what if I made a movie that starred a 9-year-old and let him carry the movie. That's really where it started. ... [I] stumbled into it, like I stumbled into teen films."

Hughes, whose movies like "The Breakfast Club" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" informed the lives of generations of angst-ridden youth, admitted that he originally wanted to work with teen actors because he figured the younger the actor, the better chance that they wouldn't question his abilities.

"I started making teen films because if I was going to direct, I wanted to make sure I didn't have an actor saying to me, 'You have no idea what you're doing,' because I didn't," he told MTV. "I figured, well maybe if they're like 15, they won't ask me that question, or at least I could say to them, 'Do you know what you're doing?' and they wouldn't know either. It's all coincidental."

He never set out to become the "Teen King," he said. "My career was not planned in any way," he said. "So I went from Teen King to Kid Meister, and I don't know what's next."