I first saw 'West Side Story' on stage in 1958. I was in the army, having been conscripted while under contract to MGM. I caught the musical in New York, fell in love with it, bought the album, and memorised the whole thing.
The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.
I always like to play roles where I either love the character or think that it's a story that I can tell better than anyone else. There are always reasons for me to do whatever I do.
I love gothic monsters, but I like to root them more firmly in the traditional folklore from which they sprang. Or at least, I like to evoke the feeling of those folk stories.
I don't watch television, but I saw 'The Office' by accident. I thought it was so sophisticated, the Victorian love story, and so bold. We'd do anything, all of us, to not work in that environment, and then I'm sitting there watching hours of it.
I'm a 50-year-old guy making music for over 20 years. I've been writing songs since I was 20, so it's really been 30 years, and it's always been personal, but I've always told stories.
I've had the privilege of meeting and/or interviewing most of the top metal and hard rock artists at various points in my career and sharing their stories and music with millions of fans on air through TV and radio.
When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music.
To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse - we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light.
I've programmed myself musically to come up with love-feeling tracks that are romantic, sexy, but classy, all in one. And that's the challenge. Once I create that music, then the lyrical content starts to come - you know, the stories and things like ...
I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic.
Although awareness of cancer's prevalence in the United States improves and medical advances in the field abound, pancreatic cancer has largely been absent from the list of major success stories.
The fact that he didn't get credit for a while is more the story of social injustice. But his own spirit wasn't driven by that, and wasn't dependent upon that. He just wished he had the cash to go to medical school.
It's not like I just have to go to Washington and go to the White House everyday, and go to the same press conference at 10 in the morning and then be briefed at 4 in the afternoon, and then get a story on at 6.
Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young.
I prefer to speak of 'interdimensionals' rather than 'extraterrestrials' because the latter has connotations of 'little green men' and all the other cliche responses. Nor does it tell the full story.
The story of the Alamo has touched many more people than one would think. So, I would like to pay my respects to those men on both sides of the walls in those months of February and March 1836.
Animation is very singular. Like, even the 'Toy Story' movies. People will go, 'Oh, gosh, you're so lucky, getting to play opposite Tom Hanks!' And it's, like, 'It may have appeared to be that, but we were never in the room together.'
I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.
My father is an actor, and I used to go on set to visit him. I saw the stories he was telling and said: 'That's what I want to do.' I was always in awe whenever I went to the movies or when I watched television.
I like those kinds of songs that have details that you remember and that have stories that mean something and that open up into different levels philosophically. I like those kinds of movies, and I like those kinds of books.
