Since the founding of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other mainstays of what technology writers have come to call 'the social Web' or 'Web 2.0,' a sizable portion of humanity has learned to be together while apart, sacrificing intimacy for control ...
I told a doctor once, "Doc, if you want to know what's inside of me, put down the x-ray and pick up my novel!
I think our problems are inherently unsolvable. We need to change our genetic make-up or create computers that will think us out of it. I don't think humans are able to deal with what we have.
I think that in the realm of commercial, popcorn cinema, the amount of message or smuggling of ideas you can get in there is quite limited. Like, if you think you're going to make a difference or change anything, you're on pretty dangerous thin ice.
Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies...
I have my misgivings about 3-D. I don't like the lack of blacks and whites, how it dulls the image, how the color gets corrupted. I don't necessarily like the experience of having heavy glasses in front of me.
I can think of no other experience quite like that of being 20 or so pages into a book and realizing that this is the real thing: a book that is going to offer the delicious promise of a riveting story, arresting language and characters that will hau...
My family spans many world religions, ethnicities and nationalities. The truth is that I don't have one identity. I'm Scottish, British, European, Humanist, Atheist and in part at least, culturally Jewish.
When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.
Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they ...
'Flash Forward' was one of the big heartbreaks of my career. It was just this very frustrating experience. If we'd been allowed to tell the story we wanted to tell, I don't know that it would've been more successful or not. There's no way to know.
With 'Good Will Hunting,' Miramax made certain the recruited audience wasn't expecting to laugh at Robin Williams like they normally do. From my limited experience, you can really blow test screenings by conducting them in the wrong way.
I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
The interesting thing is that when you start out, people have no judgment and they see you young and fresh as a filmmaker - and because you have no experience yet, you're much more naive and think anything is possible.
I've made it my mission to make movies starring African American actors and about the African American experience and put them in the mainstream. They're very universal stories I've told - every movie I've done.
I graduated in '91, so the '90s for me were very much the first years out of school, so I can't really look at that decade as independent of my own experience of my 20s, really.
Japan is the most intoxicating place for me. In Kyoto, there's an inn called the Tawaraya which is quite extraordinary. The Japanese culture fascinates me: the food, the dress, the manners and the traditions. It's the travel experience that has moved...
I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.
Nobody believed the 'Food Network' could last. Even I was short sighted and thought to myself, 24 hours of food on TV? They'll run out of things to talk about in four days! But that wasn't true. 'Food Network' continues to get better and evolve.
Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn't the bum on the street drinking Sterno; it's the working poor. They don't look any different, they don't behave any differently, they're not really any less educated. The...
I love doing demonstrations. I think to be a great chef you have to be a great teacher. I love doing classes with people who love food and enjoy food, bringing them all around one table so to speak.
