But here I am today recording this and I'm in the studio with all the others on a clean mic. It's extraordinary, the actor's found a way of doing it for himself.
But I think the credit has to go to Geddy... he spent a lot of time in the studio with Paul, I think he needed that kind of focus to be in there to be a part of the whole thing, and for the most part he made all the major decisions.
T Bone and I grew up together in Fort Worth, Texas. He had his own recording studio by the time he was seventeen years old. When we were both nineteen he made the first archival recording of my voice.
I have real TV studios. If I have an idea, I can go shoot it. I can experiment. If I choose to air it or not, it's at my discretion. I don't have to do it to somebody else's time frame.
Every time I went into the studio some engineer tried to impress me with how they're going to capture my sound with all kinds of tricks. But they limited the sound and never allowed me to play how I felt.
I can't get that live and I don't have the time to take the tape, after I've finished recording it, into a little studio somewhere else where I can get a different kind of percussion sound.
When a movie is about to come out on its initial debut, there are a lot of people involved - the financiers, the studio and the producers and also, many times, the foreign distributors. So it is a time of tremendous pressure and uncertainty.
There's no question that the '70s themselves were really wide open. There was just so much being done at that time. Every year, the major studios were commissioning things that they would never touch today or even thought of touching in the 1950s.
The release of 'Lungs' was so hard. It was terrifying, because it was the first time doing everything. The first experiences of media exposure were almost paralysing. I spent a lot of time crying on the floor of the studio - it sent me a bit mad.
I think a lot of studios today are run by women, and we are entering a time when a lot of women have evolved in Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade and wanted to become writers and comedians.
I always admired Walt's optimism. He seemed to know the direction he was going to. When I was at the studio, I remember he kept driving all of us back down to a more fundamental level all the time.
Walt Disney had always tried to get more dimension in his animation and when I saw these tapes, I thought, This is it! This is what Walt was waiting for! But when I looked around, nobody at the studio at the time was even halfway interested in it.
Phillip Vandamm: Seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the F.B.I. and a little more from the Actor's Studio.
Well, I actually first got into music as a small child, and as I became a teen, I sought out making money from music, weather that was singing lounge gigs, backup in studios, or weddings.
The beating heart of your story... that's not what shows up in a trailer. The other stuff is what shows up in a trailer, because that's what gets people in to the seats, and that's how studios make their money.
I've certainly auditioned for big budget studio films. I don't know if it's because there's so much money involved, but a lot of times the pressure overwhelms me and engulfs me. I end up falling apart in the audition.
But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.
As a director, my job is, and always has been, divided into a number of things: dealing with the crew, the money and the studio, and the marketing and publicity. These are all different jobs that have to be learned and done as well as possible. The c...
The actors are in control, getting outrageous amounts of money. The reason they're getting this kind of money is because the studios don't know what else to do. They don't have a clue about what to do except to pay an actor a lot of money.
All studio movies are the middle of the Bell curve. The only way to do something is to do it yourself. And the only way to do that is to not take any money from anyone or take as little money as possible from anyone and that's it.
I always think I don't have any songs, I don't have anything I'm working on, and I get in the studio and realize there are 20 things I'm thinking about. It's just kind of second nature.
