I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.
I love it when people come up to me and they say a line. Like, you know, 'My name is Indigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.'
I know, being a father myself, what my interpretation of true love is, or the essence of love, and you can apply it to other things besides human beings.
Is making a movie true love if you're a creative person? It could be. But in my world, the importance of being a father and having kids and knowing that connection is true love. Making a movie is love.
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
Well, I was very lucky. I was brought up west southwest coast of Scotland and my mother and father had a music shop, and so I was surrounded by pianos and drums and guitars, and music, of course.
What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.
People in England were coming up to me, saying, My mother and father turned me on to your music. This happened to me 20 years ago. When I was 40 they were saying that.
My parents had chosen the medical profession for me. I even studied a few semesters at St Xavier's College, but at the back of my mind, I always wanted to be a musician like my father.
Even if society dictates that men and women should behave in certain ways, it is fathers and mothers who teach those ways to children not just in the words they say, but in the lives they lead.
I surrounded myself with women when I was growing up because I had this horrible psycho father. Now I'm trying to really appreciate and like men more.
Dinner 'conversation' at the Cohens' meant my sister, mom, and I relaying in brutal detail the day's events in a state of amplified hysteria, while my father listened to his own smooth jazz station in his head.
My mother and father definitely encouraged me. People used to tell my mom that I should be in commercials, and then everything kicked off from there, and my first gig was some print work.
That's actually how my parents met. They were pen pals. My mom was in the Philippines and my father was in the States, and they wrote to each other. He went out to meet her, and they wed not too long after.
My argument is simple, which is, that for several thousand years in Western civilization, marriage has been the union of one man and one woman. Research is overwhelming that children need mothers and fathers.
My father was a Catholic, but my mother wasn't. She had to do that weird deal you do as a Catholic - they deign to sanction your marriage and you have to bring your children up as Catholics.
As I grew up and began identifying myself as a feminist, there were plenty of issues that continued to make me question marriage: the father 'giving' the bride away, women taking their husband's last name, the white dress, the vows promising to 'obey...
My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage.
My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the 'Grapes of Wrath,' his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day.
Even if I'd had a really happy relationship with my father and there was no emotional hiatus for a decade and a half, I probably would still have made some of the same choices for movies that I've made.
Antonio Salieri: [to Father Vogel] That was Mozart. That! That giggling dirty-minded creature I had just seen, crawling on the floor!
