I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.
I started to write a lot of ballads that were sultry and had a Norah Jones-for-country kind of feel. I wanted to bring elements of old soul music and old country music.
I don't think I could ever give up music. It's what makes me tick. If there was no music, there would be no writing.
I believe that filmmakers have to internalize the story and subtext so well that all of the departments can start to speak to each other - that music can speak to cinematography can speak to writing and back again.
Just the type of music that was around at the same time as I was writing. Some of it was wicked, definitely. But there was just one direction which I thought could be pushed that no one was pushing.
I don't have specific music for when I'm writing. I'm usually listening to the same playlist or 'artist' before I arrive at the computer as when I'm walking somewhere after leaving the computer.
I just had to find something else to fulfill me. Always being a singer and writing, it was a blessing. My brother started making music that was the kind of music I always saw myself singing.
Hebrew is my first language, so it's really the most personal and the most simple. When I write in Hebrew, I don't look for sophistication in music; it's just pure emotion that comes out.
I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song.
The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.
You know, I mean this sincerely, you know, I'm so grateful that I get to get up in the morning and do this, you know, and write books.
I get started at 5:30 in the morning and write till 10 A.M. Then I hike six or seven miles before going back to work.
With my first book, 'A Letter to a Young Brother,' I figured it would be my only book I was ever going to write. What happened with that is a lot of young men would reach out to me.
I like to write about women, not so much about the way they relate to men, but about the way they relate to each other. And I don't think anyone's really doing it.
I'd been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets.
Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.
One of the reasons to do documentaries is that. There's more sense of creating something, more sense of my own soul in the documentaries than in movies, because I don't write the movies I do.
So it took me five years because in the interim I have been doing a lot of personal appearances and movies and some television series that went into the plumbing and I stopped writing for a while.
The time it would take me to write a screenplay it would take me the time to make two films. I would rather make the movies, and I'm a better moviemaker than I would be writer.
I have my dark side like anybody, you know, depression, anxiety... and I write about gritty, real-life stuff.
It's impossible to write and produce a record when your parents are dying. I really tried, I really, really tried, but it just wouldn't come.
