One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was p...
I always wanted to play a boxer because some of my favorite films, as a boy, were those great boxing movies, like 'Raging Bull', 'Rocky', 'The Set Up', 'Fat City and Hard Times'. I just loved those films.
My favorite thing to do is still to go back to Peoria, go to my cabin and hunt with the boys. This is a great lifestyle, don't get me wrong. But fun for me is going back with my buddies I grew up with.
I have one good girlfriend and then most of my friends are guys. Which I love, because they're just like so easygoing and I love to play like Xbox and just chill out when I'm not working, so boys are probably the way to go for me.
I just got exposed to electronica, and I really liked it. I am also good with alternative rock. I like Lana Del Rey, Adele, Dido, Jack Johnson, and I love the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
A lot of people felt I was getting work because I was Boy George. My response at the time was that there's a lot of DJs making records, they're not all making good records, but they have the right to do that.
I think every day there is some new actress comes out and inspires me to do something else... like Hilary Swank. After she did Boys Don't Cry, I felt this yearning to go out and be even half as good as she was.
I remember, when I was a little kid, I was good at sports, and I could jump off the high board. And then puberty hit, and suddenly I was looking to boys for direction. I remember that as a great loss.
I almost stand in awe when I think of Joseph Smith. The angel appeared to him in 1823 - he said to this simple little boy, 'Your name should be known for good and evil throughout the entire world.'
I wanted to be a Priest at one point. I was pretty religious. I was an altar boy, and I was good at it. Then, I started meeting girls and I'm like 'You know, maybe I shouldn't be a Priest.'
My appearance on 'Public School' garnered a smattering of fan mail from girls, which was good, and letters from mothers saying I was the sort of boy they'd like their daughters to go out with - which was not quite as good.
There's always that discussion about fiction about how do you market it - these are books for boys, these are books for girls, these are books for adults. Actually, they're just stories, and if they're good stories, then they surpass those boundaries...
So I guess the complete lack of any new developments is what struck me. That and the fact that much of the good we had done for the artists' side of the industry with G.O.D. had been just as quickly undone by the big boys.
I don't have one role that I want to play. I guess... I want to be a producer. I want to be an activist. I want to be proactive in bringing about work for men, women, boys, girls, everybody who is good at what they do and deserve a shot at it.
I'm a fan boy when it comes to Michael Buble. He's just so good at 'it'. He's got a voice of this generation, but he's like a time capsule; he's got a voice that could have fit in anywhere over the last hundred years. It's stellar.
I am a good boy. Sweet. I love to chill. I have a select set of friends, am big on house music, love Goa. I don't read much. Though that is one habit I am trying to inculcate.
I love eating chocolate cake and ice cream after a show. I almost justify it in my mind as, 'You were a good boy onstage and you did your show, so now you can have some cake and ice cream.'
This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It's authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.
I knew I had to write a good screenplay to be taken seriously, and I knew I needed to present Mississippi on visuals instead of just saying, 'Hey I wanted to film it in Mississippi.' It would seem like it was a hometown boy just wanting to be home.
Many years ago... many, many years ago, I brought up a boy, and I said to him, 'Son, if you ever become a writer, try to write a good part for your old man sometime.' Well, by cracky, that's what he did!
Restaurants are like having children: it's fun to make them, maybe, but then you have them for good and bad. You are going to have to raise them and if something goes wrong when they are 30 years old, they will still be your little boy.
