I do work a lot. I mean, most of my income, I would say, comes from live performances. And then you've got publishing, you've got record royalties.
I think you just have to cross your fingers that there's enough artists out there that keep producing interesting work, and eventually it will form a kind of wave that will force people to pay attention to it.
I don't know any musician who got to the top without hard work. Take whoever you want. They all work bloody hard, harder than you think.
These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable.
As independent filmmakers, we are actually deeply dependent on each other. The Spirit Awards are a public expression of those bonds, the intricate set of relationships and histories that we filmmakers depend on to make our most personal work.
That is one of the things about going on tour, that I get to work with some really talented people and it allows me to be able to listen to them as well - and just have fun on stage.
You have to have a work ethic, and you have to be educated in what you're doing. You have to take it seriously. It doesn't mean that everything you do has to be serious. But you've got to have the tools.
I don't think there is anything hard at all about having a lot of songs. It makes it easier to be less precious about them, and know that everybody's going to want to work on some of them.
I still believe I have a lot of liberal thoughts, but I also believe when you work hard, you shouldn't be penalized and pay more because you work hard.
They believed you can't mix rock, country, and rap, and that crossover is dead. I always knew it would work. And it will always work as long as you're really into it and like what you're doing.
I was doing acting work at Fox - bit pieces with Greg Peck in The Gunfighter and things like that - and grew up more or less as a Fox contract player in about two years.
We still have a lot of work to do in American culture. More open-mindedness is happening - in some cases rapidly, in some, slowly.
After college, rather than pursue real work, I joined a folk group and sang in coffee houses and nightclubs, an occupation that does little for the intellect and even less for the complexion.
I think that there will always be artists out there who think they need to sign a major label deal in order to be successful. And that machine is what is going to work for them - there's tons of examples of pop stars who need that machine.
I think naturally I'm a very visual kind of person. If I wasn't in filmmaking, I'd be in something related to visuals. And I used to actually work as a visual-effects artist.
In Korean, my lyrics are witty and have twists. But translated into English, it doesn't come over. I've tried writing in English, just for me, but it doesn't work. I've got to know everything about a culture, and I don't.
There definitely isn't a structure anymore to how I get ideas. A lot of times I'll just write down a phrase, or I'll have an idea that's attached to just a few chords. Other times, it's work.
In practice, the copyright system does a bad job of supporting authors, aside from the most popular ones. Other authors' principal interest is to be better known, so sharing their work benefits them as well as readers.
Online piracy needs to be dealt with itself, because people are just wholesale stealing people's work and not paying for it. It's very hard to figure out a way to fix it.
'Masquerade' is the autobiography of Wyclef Jean. A lot of people know me through my work with Carlos Santana or Destiny's Child, winning all those Grammy Awards, but you do not know what is going on inside me.
Soaps are one of the few areas on TV that really embrace older women. In drama, there's this ridiculous invisibility for women between the ages of 40 and 60. Unless you're old enough to play a grandmother, there just aren't the roles.
