The way the business things work in Russia is you have to meet people, you have to go through a certain amount of etiquette and business things are done just simply by a shake of the hand and whether they like you or not.
You have a career, and you start as a business person. And you work your way, you reach this peak, and you know the time's going to come when you go back down.
In business, you can have one massive success that earns $50 million overnight, and that's it. You're successful. End of story. But in the music business, you have to keep on doing it.
I used to go with him and I'd sometimes play, take over from him. That was my first taste of the music business, I suppose, but I was also in the youth orchestra at Johnston Grammar.
As a rock star, I have two instincts, I want to have fun, and I want to change the world. I have a chance to do both.
A chance to work with the guys from Isis sounded like a lot of fun. I've always been into the atmospheric sounds they had created with that project and felt my sense of melody would meld well with theirs.
Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.'
The cool thing about being a songwriter, or a writer, I guess, in general, you can take on a lot of different things, experience a lot of different things, just by writing about them.
The cool thing about being famous is traveling. I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.
I don't ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It's like, 'Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.'
It's cool to have critical success because it's always nice for your peers to say, 'Good job.' But who cares about them?
I studied to be a lawyer, and after that I did something, obviously, completely different. With change, you learn something. If you do the same thing over and over again, you never learn anything.
I change the language with which I use my voice. In opera, I know I have an orchestra behind me; I have to communicate to people very far from me.
There are those who simply want to live their lives, and feel they cannot live the way they want to in Iran. Others are ideologically motivated: They will stay no matter what and try to change things.
I always wanted to get into rock music so I could cover up my real personality, change my voice, and create a false self to hide behind.
One might have thought that the most significant change in the film industry that would come about with a transition from the communist economy to capitalism would fundamentally concern the sources of funding.
'Record Without A Cover' was about allowing the medium to come through, making a record that was not a document of a performance but a record that could change with time, and would be different from one copy to the next.
The cartoon is a metaphor really for the fact that it's almost impossible in our celebrity obsessed culture to move around genres and sort of change you ideas, change your face, you know?
Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.
It gets lonely. I miss my family on stage. This might change one day. I'm certainly not going to say I'm not going to work with them again.
I wouldn't say that I'm actually trying to cause chills in the audience, but certainly my goal is to, at the very least, effect a physiological response - at the most, to effect some sort of state change, ideally, in the audience.
