I love the weather in L.A., and I can drive 20 minutes to the beach, hike minutes from my house or go snowboarding a couple hours away.
In production, in the first couple of weeks of production, that it was more like making an internet musical.
Apart from a couple that were just having fun with the concept and making fun of [Donald] Trump - like the one we did with Keegan Michael-Key - they really are little hero narratives. The whole "Save the Day" - it's called that, specifically, for a reason - ethos is there is this heroic act called voting. And the world is scary, and things are overwhelming, and there's a lot at stake.
Any band on their first couple records is just trying to keep up with their inspiration.
And I thought maybe I didn't need to worry about my heart anymore because it had stopped beating a couple of seconds earlier, and I was still sitting there living and breathing-though admittedly I wasn't feeling much of anything.
I'm so excited. I love Peeta so much. I think that over the course of the next couple of books, he has so many interesting places to go to, character-wise. I'm ready to dive full-force into it. When I saw the movie actually, it got me energized. 'Let's go get some cameras! Let's go shoot the second one right now!'
When it comes to the acting stuff, I like to show up for a couple days and kind of be outrageous and silly, and go back to my day job.
I want to be that good. I want to be Barry Bonds. I want when I pitch to be 'Win Day.' I want my teammates to relax on the days I pitch because they know they only have to get us a couple of runs. I'm totally prepared for that.
Well the only reason to go back, for me and I think for anyone involved would be if we could do something truly spectacular. We've been talking about it for a couple years and there's always been this idea, a big idea, in the back of my head that we've been talking about.
There are a couple of films that I've done, where I've had to get on a horse and wear a pair of tights, so that helped. But, nothing could have prepared me for the fun of wielding magic like Merlin does, especially in the perverted mind of Chris Chibnall.
It's all about human condition, ultimately. That's what you're looking at. You're also looking to have some fun, as well, because that also translates. Maybe wearing tights once in awhile helped. Getting up on a horse a couple of times before might have helped.
I've met the Queen a couple of times, and she's been delightful. In fact, I often find myself thinking: 'What would the Queen do in this situation? Write a thank-you note? Yes, I'll do that.' She's all about courtesy.
I spent a couple of months just riding a bike doing my own training in the streets.
We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure.
Social mobility decreased under Labour and under the current government it is reversing. The differences between the poorest and richest are returning to Victorian levels. We don't have open sewers and infant mortality rates at fifty percent but in economic terms we're getting to a level of disparity we haven't seen for a couple of hundred years. And we're getting there very quickly.
From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be confused for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes. In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - the metropolitan cities will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Towns will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples invisible.
I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.
That and when you're doing live action you don't normally get to see the thing before it's in production. In this case we'd go in every couple weeks and look at animatic and sketches. The way they do it - is they'll put it up on a screen and the storyboard artist who worked on that sequence will talk you through it. Kind of like a pitch session. Then they would leave and we would sit there with the directors and say 'Alright - what if we change that? What if we do that?' It's very different from live action.
In high school, I had a teacher there who was really great to me and with whom I finally dared to admit I wanted to be a writer myself, and we did a project where I wrote terrible, 17-year-old fiction. But I remember a couple of the stories. I'd love it if I could read with pride something that I wrote that long ago, but it hasn't happened yet.
I had made a couple of records in Europe. One as a leader, and one as a sideman before that. It was what it was. I started to work with Maria Schneider around that period and some other people, I started to get called to sub at the Vanguard in my mid-20s.
I was able to go over [Saxophone Competition] and work a little more in Europe. I'm thankful that those of kinds of things. Simultaneously, some nice things did come in. I got a nice festival that came in, in Virginia through that. There was a club that opened in DC in the famous Willard Hotel near the White House. And the club was called The Nest. I played there a few nights. Some musicians in Philly and D.C. kind of brought me down and got me on a couple things. So things opened up a little bit.
We had been thrown out of a couple of places that we had lived in when I was a kid and all the family photos and records and toys were long since gone. But I think somebody had given us a couple of records.
When I was 13, 14, 15, I had played in a couple of jazz ensembles. I didn't know anything about harmony, about II-V-I, though I had learned my scales with Caesar [DiMauro].
There have been times I've finished a big job and thought, 'Great, a couple of weeks off.' But then a couple of weeks turns to three weeks and then after a month you're staring at the phone willing it to ring.
We have had a good working relationship. He has got a tough job. We had different ideas sometimes and we got on pretty well. I have challenged him and he has challenged me. His form has been up and down and that can be tough. I suppose we've been lucky. Sourav and I complement each other. We are two different personalities. He is softer than me. I probably spoke my mind in the change rooms in a rougher way than him. Sourav and I formed an odd couple but it seems to have worked.