Recording a scene with paint rather than film sinks you more deeply into your surroundings. You have to look a little harder and a little longer. And you end up with a memento.
When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.
I think when you get on with the actors that you're working with, even if you do have really intimate scenes, as long as you get on well, and have a bit of a laugh while doing it, then it's fine.
Well the Bombay film wasn't always like how it is now. It did have a local industry. There were realistic films made on local scenes. But it gradually changed over the years.
I think I must have too much to eat, we were doing a scene where we were crawling, and I ripped my trousers. I was very embarrassed. I was sown in, stitched in, quickly!
Some of the biggest changes that have happened are behind the scenes, in the way we produce the magazine. E.g., much of our production has been brought in-house via desktop publishing.
I came to the big city and I started to get involved in the punk scene and stuff, and I wanted to sort of brand myself. I made a pretty conscious effort to be a different type of person.
I shy away from showing cruelty on the page. A lot of the violence in my books actually happens off stage. The police come on to the scene after the event has occurred.
It's just a very different process from maybe working one or two days a week doing one or two scenes a day versus sustaining a performance over two hours or so eight times a week.
I used to be very rigid because I just wanted to get through it. Now, if I think a scene should go a certain way and it goes another, I'm able to go that new way with ease.
I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, 'That's absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it.'
These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.
Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.
I think everyone's different but in comedy, I try to do my scene to make the director and the other actors laugh. If I can make them laugh and we have the same sensibility, then I'm on the right page.
The scene then as now was centered in New York. For the most part, I've kept a bit apart from that attractive and seductive city. I've done it by living in the country within commuting distance.
If you had told me when I was starting out that I would be coming down to Nashville, kind of weaving in and out of the country scene, I never would've thought that in a million years.
I'll need every ounce that I have to drive it through. Film and TV require that energy. Sometimes fight scenes can be pretty intense. When I was shooting 'Heaven' it was truly guerrilla film-making.
I remember doing the sex scene in Red Rock West. I had to kiss Nic Cage and then look like I was going down on him. And he couldn't do anything - he just had to lie there.
I don't write shows with dialogue where actors have to memorize dialogue. I write the scenes where we know everything that's going to happen. There's an outline of about seven or eight pages, and then we improvise it.
I felt alive when I read a script and acted out a scene, or sang a song. It was my dream. I'm just very lucky that I'm still doing it and able to earn a living from it.
I played a paraplegic on a show called 'Neighbours.' Just turned up on set, sat in a wheelchair. The producer came up to me one day and said, 'We have to cut around that entire scene because your leg was moving.'
