Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.
Recently, I was in Bernalda, my dad's ancestral home town in Italy. He has just refurbished a palazzo and turned it into a hotel, so we had my sister's wedding there. It was beautiful.
I would lay awake nights and cry a lot thinking, is my dad gonna come home? Is he gonna go to jail again? Is he going to get killed?
Death Valley is really wide-open - it's bigger than Rhode Island - and it's less a part of California than an ungoverned territory, so there's lots of weird cops-and-robbers stuff going on.
We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social an...
We ourselves can die with comfort and even with joy if we know that death is but a passport to blessedness, that this intellect, freed from all material chains, shall rise and shine.
The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.
I don't think an NC-17 rating is the kiss of death. Nor do I think that, in the hands of the right filmmakers, studios have a preconceived notion to pass on NC-17 material.
Buying an apartment in New York was beyond my wildest dreams. I had to scrape together every cent to buy it. And I'm so happy I did.
As I watched bookstores close, I began to wonder how that felt for the owners. Owning a bookstore was their dream and now they're struggling and seeing those dreams fall apart.
We are not supposed to be all equal. Let's just forget that. We are supposed to have equal rights under law. If we do that, we have done enough.
Mormons... are so strong, they can handle wealth, they are confident. I think it is because they are not bogged down by rules for equality, but have a firmly defined system of relative status and responsible command.
Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other.
I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.
I read science, because to me, that's extremely exciting. It's like a great detective story, and it's happening right in front of us.
It's very important for us to see that science is done by people, not just brains but whole human beings, and sometimes at great cost.
I have thought about it a great deal, and the more I think, the more certain I am that obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child.
It's so great to be able to write from home. My bread is rising downstairs, and I'm upstairs writing. I have a writing room that my grandchildren consider one of their playrooms.
I'm frustrated with Hollywood and television and the movies because they see science fiction as an excuse for eye candy, for lots of great special effects.
A great many things which in times of lesser knowledge we imagined to be superstitious or useless, prove today on examination to have been of immense value to mankind.
Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.
