Bobcat Goldthwait’s excited about his latest project. It’s not the kind of version of excitement he’s used to make a name for himself as a comedian, but the kind that comes from seeing an idea come to life. It’s taken him seven years, but Goldthwait has finally found an outlet for another creative passion.

“I have a career that not everyone knows. I make small, independent movies,” Goldthwait says during an interview at the Langham Huntington Hotel about his truTV series “Bobcat Goldthwait’s Misfits & Monsters.”

“All of my movies are different each time, and I realized there are so many different genres that I want to tackle, I’m not going to get to all of them.”

He may still not get to every genre, but Goldthwait has found a way to tackle a lot more through his anthology series. The eight-episode first season will feature a mashup of wildly different genres to tell stories with funny, imaginative twists. It’s animation mixed with horror in the series opener, “Bubba the Bear,” where voice-over actor Noble Bartell (Seth Green) begins to question his career and his sanity when his popular animated cartoon creation becomes his real-life stalker.

Other guest stars throughout the first season include Michael Ian Black, Bridget Everett, Dave Foley, Seth Green, Melissa Joan Hart, David Koechner and Danny Pudi. Asked if he heard the voices of certain actors in his head when he was writing, Goldthwait laughs and explains while there are voices in his head, they have nothing to do with the casting process.

Those voices have helped Goldthwait, 56, find success in TV, film and stage for more than three-and-a-half decades.

“I was once asked as a filmmaker, who am I competing with,” Goldthwait says. “My answer was ‘the Grim Reaper.’ I am not competing with Wes Anderson. I’m competing with time.”

When he’s not performing, he spends much of his time writing stories with themes he wants to explore or genres he wants to tackle. One of his goals with each of the stories is to look at social issues.

Goldthwait laughs and says he didn’t realize until he was finished writing “Bubba the Bear” that the major issue of a man struggling to deal with his performance persona that’s gotten bigger than his life is one that sounds autobiographical. When he was writing the script, Goldthwait was thinking about his good friend, Tom Kenny, who has been the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants for years. It was Goldthwait’s daughter, a costume designer on the anthology series, who pointed out the irony to her father.

The New York native came to prominence in the mid-1980s with the TV specials “An Evening with Bobcat Goldthwait — Share the Warmth” and “Bob Goldthwait — Is He Like That All the Time?” plus the “Police Academy” films. What he plays on stage and screen is far from the soft-spoken man sitting on the hotel patio chatting about the new TV show.

Goldthwait understands why he’s thought of in such a frantic light.

“On some levels, even though they know the person I am playing is not a real character, it’s something they don’t want to admit. It’s like not wanting to know that Lou Costello had a normal voice,” Goldthwait says.

The one place that’s undeniably Goldthwait’s voice is in the writing for “Misfits & Monsters,” as he wrote and directed all eight episodes. His biggest influence when it comes to tone, structure and design came from being a huge fan of “The Twilight Zone” when he was growing up.

Goldthwait deeply appreciated how Rod Serling was able to get around censorship to deal with hot button topics by telling stories in a different, often satirical way. There’s far less censorship these days, especially on basic cable, but Goldthwait has taken a page from Serling’s writing style and deals with sensitive issues in a not-overt way.

He’s getting to share his voice on a lot of different topics, but Goldthwait stresses the voice that is most clearly his comes out in his standup performances.

“Early on, I would just try to be outrageous to get a laugh or reaction from people. Later on, I jettisoned the idea that I wasn’t going to say anything that the character would say. Eventually I just jettisoned the character and began to speak for myself,” Goldthwait says.

Goldthwait’s ideas were so fully formed that when he pitched the idea to truTV, they had to tell him to stop talking because they already had decided to purchase the show.

He was so excited during the pitch because an anthology series would give him the chance to make small films he had written and he would get to direct each project. The big difference was Goldthwait had more money for an episode of the series than he had to make some of his independent movies, which include “Shakes the Clown,” “God Bless America” and “Sleeping Dogs Lie.”

“For me, someone who wants to tell stories, this was ideally the best way I can do this,” Goldthwait says.

"Bobcat Goldthwait's Misfits & Monsters" airs at 10 a.m. Wednesdays on truTV.