I am simply a fairly typical product of a movable sensibility, living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly mongrel. I am a multinational soul on a multinational globe on which more and more countries are as polyglot and restless as airports. Taking planes seems as natural to me as picking up the phone or going to school. I fold up my self and carry it around as if it were an overnight bag.
I believe the public schools are the greatest cultural influence in this country.
When buying a new house ... Buy the house far enough away from school so your kids can't come home for lunch.
The camera course was a bit crap. But when I was in drama school, I wasn't interested. I wanted to be a stage actress. I was not interested in learning camera craft. But then you throw yourself in the deep end when you do get a job in front of the camera because you have absolutely no idea what you're doing, and it is a skill.
I'd always wanted to go to drama school. My life plan was to get into drama school and become an actor, but it took me three years.
Have we become a cupcake league? We already have better helmets and gear. Wonder how the old school players feel about this. Not in the back of minds when talking about 18 game season so let's play football please... Even guys using shoulders to hit are getting flagged for helmet-to-helmet. Defense is getting sloppy because guys are avoiding fines and will get worse if suspending comes into play.
Any place where you have to deal with many social actors like a school - you have the parents, the Ministry of Education, the school board, and the teachers - you need all kinds of sets and rules. You're trying to foresee anything that can happen and everything becomes really rigid. They don't want to talk about death because they don't want to overwhelm the children, but that has already happened, so you're not going to overwhelm them more.
I was interested in immigration and I wanted to use that in the film, not necessarily to talk about immigrants, although I wanted to do that, but to talk about ourselves through the eyes of an immigrant. The film takes place in the school and it tells us a little bit about who we are and where we're at, but through the eyes of someone who has a different background.
In the private system and the private schools, the principal is pretty much a dictator. He or she can hire whoever s/he wants. Of course, in the movie, in the story, she makes a mistake by hiring him. But, if she doesn't, I have no story.
It's like a laboratory, a micro-society of real life, so it didn't look odd to talk about bureaucracy. In the school, in the class, there are already a lot of children from different ethnic backgrounds so the reality is there. I don't have to shove it in people's face. It's just there and it's normal.
If you look at the end of the movie [Monsegnor Lahzar], I give a lot of space to what the spectator can also imagine of what's going to be Bachir's life afterwards. So, there's the restraint part, and there's the fact that the story is happening in the school which allowed me to tackle all these subjects without making it too didactic, because in the school everything happens.
At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university.
I got into plays in high school then I ended up going to college for it.
American megalomania is largely responsible for the growth of the Skyscraper School.
From the time that I was in high school, my life really revolved around live theater, so it almost feels genetic.
High school was the first time I ever saw spoken word poetry. The first place I ever performed a poem was at my school, so in some ways it was the nucleus of how it all started. For me I think high school was a period of trying to figure myself out, and poetry was one of the ways I did that, and was a very helpful avenue to try to do that.
I didn't really think about becoming a professional artist until high school, when I realized that everything else required too much math.
Our early days - our audiences were always very sparse. We played very obscure places in very obscure parts of the world, mainly Kansas. We played frat parties, we played high school proms, we played clubs.
Acting is a tough industry. There are a lot of kids out there at drama schools and not a lot of money about, especially as the arts are being cut.
My acting career began when I walked into a drama school class run by Anna Scher in Islington. Anna discovered a lot of people: Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke, Gary and Martin Kemp, and Dexter Fletcher were among my contemporaries.
I got a new 4-track cassette recorder a year or so after high school. For a while I would just stare at it thinking, how am I going to do this if I don't play guitar or keyboards? How am I going to write and record a song if I don't know how to play any instruments? I mean, I played the violin, but I didn't know anything about how to work a 4-track.
I went to North Texas State, one of the great jazz schools. When I realized I wasn't going to be Miles Davis, I switched my major to English and theater.
I took ballet for two years in high school and then in college on and off, and I went back into class. I'm nowhere near good enough to be a professional, but it's great to be in that environment. The discipline is so impressive.
The college kids should think hard about what they're doing. If you have a great idea for a company, there's no right time to start it, and it's often better to start it sooner rather than later. I went to Stanford undergrad and Stanford Law School, and if I had to do it over again, I might still do those things, but I wish I had asked the type of questions like, why I was doing it, was it just for the status and prestige, or was it because I was really interested in the substance of it.
There are many cases in which gifted children have done great things without special school programs. There are also gifted kids who have been to special schools and achieved nothing that has benefited the world as a whole. Without solid evidence, I have no confidence that funding school programs for the intellectually gifted would do more good than the most cost-effective programs to help people in extreme poverty.
