Whenever I have time, I try to get in the studio and write, whether it's for me or other artists or my catalog of music. It's definitely one of my favorite parts of the music industry.
When I graduated college, I had a fairly successful weekly club gig and was buying more studio equipment and writing my own music. I realized I didn't want to work.
I learn stuff from making music every time I go in the studio. I'm continuing to try to find new ways to play in a song or be in a song and have a positive impact on a song.
I worked as a production assistant on a couple of films, and finally, I got a job at an animation studio as an editor. After that, work begat work. I got into directing music videos and commercials.
So when bands work with me and it's 10 o'clock, usually you'd have to be getting out of the studio, we could go on until 2 in the morning cause it's my place!
And usually the studios they don't want you to have credit for your movies because they want to take credit for the movies because if you get credit for your movies they've got to pay you more.
I have nothing against these big CGI movies, but there are not enough of the other ones - the ones with stories about character that have a beginning, a middle and an end. I said that to a couple of studio heads and they said, 'That's novel.'
The reality is that there are so few roles out there for women and for women of color, and I'm a character actor, this I know. And I'm getting to see more of the roles that are out there, but there aren't many. And zilch have been studio movies. Zilc...
Nowadays the big Hollywood studios only make about three movies a year, and they cost about $200 million each. There's no room for error in that, and not a lot of room, I would think, for free expression.
Once we were in the studio, we realized we were getting certain effects through the shooting of the dramatic scenes on video, shooting off a screen and then getting wave patterns and stuff like that.
My first show sold within the first 3 minutes, and I came back to the studio and spent the next two and a half years making almost nothing.
No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.
The film, even when we were making it in that budget range, which was really a coup - we got it made because we pitched it to the studio head, Joe Roth.
I met will.i.am in the studio and played him a couple of songs and he liked them. We're similar but there's nobody in my lane doing what I'm doing.
I'm such a fanatic about exercise that I opened my own gym, 3Sixty Cycling Studio, and I exercise almost every single day.
I'm not interested in making a $60-million studio film with a bunch of 24-year-olds telling me what to do.
I was under contract to Paramount. They wanted to make me into somebody which I was not. So I got so scared and rebelled, so they threw me out of the studio.
Tim Conway was a little different from the rest. He was always in the back of the studio building something with the prop man, rewriting his lines, or plotting our demise.
I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.
The more commercial work that is happening, the more people are operating cameras and are setting up studio lights, the greater the opportunity for drama production to happen.
I've always said I'm not the kind of designer who likes to lock himself away in a studio and let the rest of the company deal with it. I work very closely with everyone on the team.
