Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite.
Eccentric doesn't bother me. 'Eccentric' being a poetic interpretation of a mathematical term meaning something that doesn't follow the lines - that's okay.
In the past, I've never tried to discount or stop what people are saying because on some levels I find it interesting.
A good thing to live by is to go after what truly interests you.
I like getting older. When you're in your twenties you're really forging for your future. Things take shape later on.
I still have a reputation as an eccentric. But the fact is that audiences probably mix up my roles with me as a person.
My interest in music tends toward being orchestral music. And the repertoire of music that exists is, to me, far more emotive than what is standardly used in movie scores. That isn't always. I think there've been some excellent movie scores by excellent directors. But for the most part, watching a film, one of today's movies, I think that the emotional undertone of movie scores is pretty poor.
I started out as an actor but now I act to fund my own productions. I've managed to separate my mindset.
But there's a difference between having artistic interests and being psychotic. That's more than a fine line of differentiation, and I do see that a bit too much.
My cat can eat a whole watermelon.
As soon as anybody puts anything on film, it automatically has a point of view, and it's somebody else's point of view, and it's impossible for it to be yours.
When I started acting in the film industry when I was 16 years old, in 1980, I was going to all the revival theaters in Los Angeles. They were playing mostly films from the '60s and '70s, some from the early '20s and '30s, before that Hays commission. Those films did question things a lot, and there definitely was a switch in 1934. You can see very distinctly in 1934, it's harder to understand what the real culture was. Films made before 1934, you can really kind of see the racism, sexism, drug use, etc. that was going on at that time. And then it was all stopped.
The United States has its own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way.
For me, listening to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in particular, there's an emotional aspect - very different kinds of emotional aspects from those two composers, nonetheless, very strong emotional aspects from both of those composers.
You would think, in an ideal world, that if you were in a really good film and did a really good job, whether it was a big film or not, you would get hired a lot; but that is not my experience.
A geek by definition is somebody who eats live animals. I?ve never eaten live animals.
I like to eat and the only thing I've ever been addicted to in my life is sugar.
The books I made, most of those books were made in the '80s or early '90s. I was reacting emotionally at that time; it wasn't an intellectual thing. I didn't make those things for public presentation; those were for my friends. So I wasn't doing this to be an advocate for what I'm talking about right about now. But I'm realizing I was working properly as an artist, or whatever you want to call it, as somebody that naturally was inquisitive.
Ireland's just a place...people go there all the time.
It's frustrating when people get upset with me about not going out to DVD - the reason is that I plan to tour with the films for many, many years, not just a month or a week. Literally years. And as soon as I would put it out on DVD, it would ruin the financial possibilities of me making it a theatrical event. Whereas the book, the publishing of a screenplay, would not cause that problem.
People watch movies - and it's vague ideas, it's vague notions, but people pick up on these things, that they are supposed to think certain ways or that they're not supposed to think, basically, and they don't.
Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite. The only true cinema verite would be what Andy Warhol did with his film about the Empire State Building - eight hours or so from one angle, and even then it's not really cinema verite, because you aren't actually there.
