Happiness, then, is found to be something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.
A lot of people have said it to me 'You made me cry. ' And it was only because I cried myself when I watched the movie.
My writing is consistently influenced by everything I watched and listened to growing up, so it's just this crazy collage of everything.
When I was nine, I asked my Dad, ‘Can I have your movie camera? That old, wind-up 8-millimeter movie camera that’s in your drawer?’ And he goes, ‘Sure, take it. ’ And I took it, and I started making movies with it, and I started being as creative as I could, and never once in my life did my parents ever say, ’ What you’re doing is a waste of time. ’ Never…. . I know there are kids out there that don’t have that support system. So, if you’re out there and you’re listening, listen to me: If you wanna be creative, get out there and do it. It’s not a waste of time.
The core of the film is usually something very emotional and something that feels really real that you can relate to, it's not like done in a false way. You know a lot of films will treat emotion falsely and you can sense that very quickly.
More often than not, I'm worried about, where shouldn't we have music? Because the tendency is just to put everything everywhere all the time in a lot of movies. You end up just numbing the audience when you do that and it's not the best way to tell a story.
Brad Bird is fond of saying that music is the easiest thing that can derail a film because if it slightly goes a degree off track it will take the viewer in the wrong emotional direction. To work with people who actually care about that is a good thing.
I met this wonderful guy who owned an old pub near the Eiffel Tower called Malone's (he's French but it's an Irish name). He had a cellar with a piano and told me I could use it whenever I wanted to. I played lots of gigs down there. When I came back I played a show at the Knitting Factory.
There are two kinds of theatre, good and bad. Much as I should like to see theatre in America, I would rather have no theatre than bad theatre. What we must strive for is perfection and come as close to it as is humanly possible.
Gaia spins on, silently contemplating what it means to be born into a sarcastic universe.
You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!