Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.
I always try to hit a few areas when I'm making a record; I want the sounds to be experimental and exploratory, I want the drumming to be distinctive, and I want my voice to be able to shine through.
When I stage a violent scene, I try for it to serve a purpose. I do love those things, the makeup effects. But I love them more with the monsters. I never was much of a gore guy. I've always enjoyed just creating monsters.
I find I'm waking up really early now, just to read. Waking up at ungodly hours. But I try to keep up, religiously. When I was a kid, it used to be a book a day. Then a book a week. Now it's like a book every two weeks. But I read every day.
The movies that I do are in love with cinema, and I try to show that I am in love with cinema. I want them to be, in other ways, drinking from other sources.
I don't try to define the cosmos, I know it's unknowable, but I can understand my place in the world and my place in the universe through a mixture of Taoism, Catholicism, Zen or whatever I have at hand.
I have "fat-guy syndrome." If they give me $50 million to make a movie, I'll try to make it look like it cost a hundred. If they give me $60 million, I'll try to make it look like it cost $120.
I try to put myself into whatever character I play.
I try to nap through as much of it as possible. I didn't even know about my Christmas movie until this February.
There is a very close connection between being a doctor and a politician. The doctor tries to prevent illness, then tries to treat it if it comes. It's exactly the same as what you try to do as a politician, but with regard to society.
I usually like to get people in because I don't have a band or anything. In cities where I have friends, I try to get them to come out and dance for me.
I just try to work with what I'm given and make it the best I can.
Honestly, when I got to Hollywood I was trying to sell my songs.
My mother is a big fan of precision, and tries her best to maintain it. Unfortunately, her own incompetence gets in the way. Dinner is served, except when a can won't open. That's the way she is: fine unless something goes wrong and that minor obstacle becomes a huge wall she can't scale. She becomes helpless whenever things don't go smoothly, or exactly as she imagined them.
There's a parallel between me going through these enormous efforts to try to make a moment that means something - and in a way, the figures are doing the same thing. There is that parallel, for sure.
I know that as a writer I'm trying to, in some small way, return the gift that I got, and maybe provide a reader the kind of experience that has changed my life.
I try to make movies that I love and that I'm passionate about and that I'm proud of.
I've always had a preference for digital, all the way. I grew up through video and camcorders, and I was part of the VHS generation. I made all my stuff in high school on video, and worked for public access. Staying in digital is a very familiar, very natural progression of the things that I've worked in before, and I always try to break as much new ground as I can.
Never try to be funny right before people are about to masturbate.
Getting an unsophisticated client was the golden prize. The quickest way to make money on Wall Street is to take the most sophisticated product and try to sell it to the least sophisticated client.
The only way the band could make any money was by going on tour. But going on tour meant we had to get time off from our jobs, and we couldn't get enough time off to make enough money from touring to survive, so the only way to try was to quit our jobs. None of us had a job that was so wonderful that we were just dying to keep it.
Even the mistakes and the pain that you've caused and enacted upon you. That is definitely what I'm trying to capture
In tribal society, the most important thing to do when civilians are killed in a skirmish is to acknowledge the deaths, and provide compensation. When tribal clans fight, the victor is required to take care of the vanquished widows and orphans, which puts a limitation on bloodshed, and tempers warring groups to try and negotiate a compromise.
That's the job of the National Security Council is to try to be a disciplined clearinghouse, gathering the views from across multiple agencies, teeing up decisions that make sense for the president.
I try not to take myself too seriously.
