The absolute base-level thing that you do as a new screenwriter is send out query letters. Literally, you just say, 'Hi, Mr. So-and-So,' and you give them a one-sentence description of one of your scripts. You send it out to a list of people you foun...
Reaganism as a political movement has enormous resources behind it and it seeks - through stagecraft and through a tremendous level of effort toward propaganda - to present an image of Reagan that is so much larger-than-life that it sort of blinds us...
A wise man once told me family don’t end in blood, but it doesn’t start there either. Family cares about you, not what you can do for them. Family’s there through the good, bad, all of it. They got your back even when it hurts. That’s family
We say it’s a modern American Western - two gunslingers who ride into town, fight the bad guys, kiss the girl and ride out into the sunset again. And we were always talking from the very beginning that if you’re going to have cowboys, they need a...
I didn't always want to act. My passion was writing, and it still is one of my primary passions to this day, but it wasn't until high school when I started acting in plays that it became a thought of something I might want to do. And when I applied t...
People have said, 'Why don't you make your own company like Chan-wook Park has his own company,' but my head is full of writing and directing and I don't feel like I want to run a company. That's not really within my personality as well.
We feel like 'Lost' deserved a real resolution, not a 'snow globe, waking up in bed, it's all been a dream, cut to black' kind of ending. We thought that would be kind of a betrayal to an audience that's been on this journey for six years. We thought...
The creative process is not like a situation where you get struck by a single lightning bolt. You have ongoing discoveries, and there's ongoing creative revelations. Yes, it's really helpful to be marching toward a specific destination, but, along th...
As a little boy of 3 or 4, I became lame. Something was wrong with my right leg. There are pictures of me being pulled around in a little wagon. The doctors didn't know what to do. So my nanny took me to the miraculous Madonna at Sacro Monte in Vares...
There is a blueprint that young female singers seem to follow to make it, to make some noise when they first come out. And it's a hyper-sexualized persona. And the thing is that it works. And they do make noise. But the problem is if it's not authent...
I was adopted by a Salvadorian mother and a white father. Growing up having complete identity crisis. Then my search for my mother and trying to find out why I was given up, and how could a mother give up a child, then finding out the circumstances o...
I'm in the middle of a 25-city book tour, and I like watching what people buy in bookstores. I see people buy books that I strongly suspect they will never read, and as an author, I must tell you, I don't mind this one bit. We buy books aspirationall...
I'm a huge comic book collector. When I was a kid, I had both Marvel and DC. I was my own librarian. I made card files. I had origin stories of all the characters, and cross-referenced when they appeared in other comic books. I was full on.
If you are in Brazil and you grew up in a right-wing dictatorship, you think Marxism is liberating. But if you grew up in Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union is controlling everything and killing people, then you think capitalism is liberating. Neit...
With roasting, you've really got to bring your A-game. I hate to admit it, but I probably think and obsess more about the roasts than my own series. Because there's so much attention focused on the roasts. It's like the 'Super Bowl' of comedy. Everyb...
It was Dell who came out with their build-on-demand process, where they are able to keep a zero balance inventory. That means they don't purchase parts until an order is received. That is a way to greatly reduced overhead, since you don't need to war...
I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the l...
Not only that, but when I first met Joe, to my intense delight, he showed me that he was a collector. He was collecting some of the early Tarzan pages by Hal Foster, and, later, early Flash Gordons; and I found that we were both absolutely interested...
It's very difficult, I think, for people to be around you when you're getting lots of attention. It's very difficult for young people to understand what that's about when people start treating you differently when you've been doing the same thing you...
People like reality; I think it's always happened from the Roman times, when people used to go to a coliseum and watch people compete against each other. I think networks and cable channels find it an easier way of producing and putting things togeth...
I reached a point where I'd watched enough directors do the job that I felt I understood it. And it's not that I'm a slow learner and it took me this long; I also was enjoying writing, and I still enjoy writing - I get tremendous satisfaction out of ...