You have to get over being shy, and just be comfortable with yourself, and I think that for me, if I'd stayed in a small town, I'd be a different person.
'Graveminder' is about a mortician, a young woman with commitment issues, a dead teenager, and a town called Claysville where the dead don't always stay dead.
I did a filmstrip on pollution in the Davison area as my Eagle Scout project and showed it around town. Businesses who were the polluters were mad at me.
There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.
It was not possible to film in California, because all the areas are heavily built up now. Coming to Cape Town is an invitation to step into the past and recreate Los Angeles of the 1930s.
I get noticed for different things I've done in different areas of town. If I'm in a rock club, it'll be Skid Row, if I'm in a mall it's the 'Gilmore Girls.'
There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the public school system.
Hollywood is a small town, believe it or not. I see the same people over and over, so it's not that overwhelming or crazy as you might think.
I went out there for a thousand a week, and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.
I was born in Iowa City and spent my early childhood on a hippie commune just outside of town.
I'd lived in Portland on and off for a decade before I'd even heard of Vanport. It was this town of 20,000 people that washed away from north Portland.
It's not good just to have life experience of film-making and that's all. It's hard to play a real person when you've been in jets and town cars for three years.
Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things - the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.
In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted.
You can't very well live in a castle while your kin is on the poor side of town and barely have enough food. Some want you to get to the top and rely on you making it for them, too.
My only failure was the restaurant in Myrtle Beach. I kept it open for four years. It was in a tourist town, it was only busy four and half, five months of the year. But the bills kept coming all year.
The town, the team, it's a family. That has helped. For some people who have had to deal with some of the problems I have had to deal with don't have football as an out.
The beauty of where I'm from - this small little town called Wallburg, North Carolina - I didn't have a TV; I was out playing ball with my dad, shooting clay pigeons.
My mother was very fashion-oriented, and she started a little children's wear business that became large in this little town. She used to be able to look at a picture of an outfit and just start cutting the fabric right there.
All the principal people in the town are concerned in the slave trade, and their chief wealth consists in the number of slaves they possess; therefore there is little chance of the trade being, for many years, totally abolished.
In India, we now see many highly qualified professionals ready to work in the rural hinterland and in their own towns and cities to tackle development issues directly without depending much on the government.
