I have a 16 year-old son, so I'm now a soccer mom. I stand on the sidelines and I hear the things parents are saying, so I want them to understand what it is their kids are feeling in any sports environment.
A lot of times when people become successful, people don't really understand what they had to do or the sacrifices they made to do that, or they assume that they had money. This is coming from, like, a kid who was broke and lived with roaches and a s...
I am completely turning into my mom. Me, trying to be stern, is her. Or when I make silly voices. My mom always uses weird voices if she's talking to a kid or a dog. I'm the same person - completely my mother.
Hillary Clinton famously talked about how raising a child takes a village. Except our society isn't set up that way. We're organized in nuclear units, and a single mom can ask her friends only so many times for help picking up the kids.
Well, I am not really a conventional mom at all. Like, I had my kids really young. I had Danny when I was 18 or 19 and then Liam when I was 23 and Molly, I had when I was a little older.
When I was a kid, my mom used to run the vacuum cleaner, and the noise would bother me so much that I would run into the woods to calm down. I feel like that vacuum cleaner has been on since I moved to New York City.
My kids have moved more in their twenties, you know, than my parents have moved in nearly 40-something years of marriage before they died. So there's a part of me that laments what we have lost, and that is a sense of community.
I think a lot of African-American kids don't have fathers to teach them how to dress, so you end up being taught by pictures in magazine and movies. You see cowboys, Indians, old Hollywood films, Cary Grant. It has an effect on you.
A lot of the films I like are more than fantasies - they're movies fascinated by the technology of space exploration, and they try to honor the laws of physics. I watched the Gregory Peck movie 'Marooned' over and over when I was a kid.
Saturday night at my house, I often trot out classic movies and force the urchins to watch them. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I think it's important to teach kids about American culture, and films are certainly a big part of it.
I definitely think my work comes from things that I liked as a kid, and things I still like now. Monsters and magic and museums and movies, a lot of things that start with 'M' for some reason.
I've always loved movies since I was a kid. I loved how they could make me happy, sad, or just show me different parts of the world and people. So when I was about six, I decided that that was what I wanted to do: make movies.
I always wanted to make big action movies as a kid, and that was my dream. In a way, 'Swingers' was the thing I suffered through the most doing because of all that dialog, so I could eventually be allowed to do a big dumb action movie, honestly.
When New Kids became really successful, I got a lot of offers to do parts in movies and TV shows, but I was really busy, so I pretty much turned everything down. But I always knew it was something that I would eventually put some energy into.
When I was a kid, my pop used to take me to the double feature. He would take me - I had two brothers - and we used to go in the early '80s and check out these grindhouse movies - a double feature, sometimes a triple feature.
When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.
I grew up loving monsters. I'm just a total monster geek. When I was a kid, I had the Aurora monster models, and I would make them. I loved the Universal horror movies and the Hammer movies. I just had an affinity for them.
I want to do movies that I'm proud of where my kids, at some point, can see and I can feel comfortable sitting there watching it with them. And just that move people. That make people feel a little bit better about themselves when they leave the thea...
I came up around people who took acting seriously, who cared about acting, cared about the theater and, in the '70s, made movies that said something that mattered. I came up with those people, and I was a kid. Their ethos and credo became mine.
Making movies is eating candy. It's a very expensive candy, so you value when you can do it. So when you can do it twice at once, it's like, you know, a kid in a candy store!
When I went to Paris, I had a lot of ideas about it that were formed in the sort of ether that flows about if you watch too many recent Woody Allen movies or took French classes as a kid. I was certainly full of those.
