MARK MOTHERSBAUGH

My favorite films, I would put my answering machine up to the television set and hit record. I'd tape my favorite movies and then I could go back and listen to them again. I only had the soundtrack, I didn't have the visuals. But I think it made me really pay attention to the soundtracks.

When I was a kid, the book that I liked the most was 'Aesop's Fables.' There was a version of it that my father read stories to us kids out of. I liked the idea of the short story format.

As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism.

I write all the time. I do artwork that's part of a diary, and I write short stories to go with them pretty much every day.

I've worked with a lot of directors, some of them you wouldn't really attach the word 'artist' to their name.

My major was Fine Arts and Education thinking I would become an Art Teacher. I couldn't visualize myself as an art teacher, thinking how it wouldn't work.

Rebellion is obsolete - change things from the inside working out.

I was lucky enough to get to perform on stage in front of 20 million people on TV, and 150 thousand in concerts. For 15 minutes I got to be a rock star, the 15 minutes is great! It turns into Spinal Tap after 20 minutes.

To me I think artists in general make a statement - and for the rest of their lives - every album, every book - are variations on a theme.

'To Kill a Mockingbird' represents Hollywood at its very finest, when a popular film could truly contain a message. It has one of the most moving scores of all time.

I really appreciate anyone trying to inject art into mainstream film.

We've turned down multi million dollar films, simply because we liked the film better. We have the luxury to do so - we have projects that make the money, and others that we do for love.

Personally I'm very happy to be behind the scenes. I like collaboration, I like working with directors.

The stories I write are often literal to events that have happened or observations that I've made, and sometimes they're fantastical.

Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to London, and the Orchestra is going to perform the score.

I don't cook - I can cook - but I'm not very good. I like being asked over for dinner, because she can't cook either. We would starve if it weren't for modern technology. I know how to work a microwave, but love home cooked meals.

I went to Kent State basically to avoid going to Vietnam, I had no idea what I was doing in the world. I was lost, and trying not to get into a fight every day.

When I was a kid, I would go to the record store, where there was a bin of things they didn't know quite how to classify. Those were my choices. That's where you would find Captain Beefheart or an early electronic album.

Technology has taken its toll on albums in a tough way. The CD format and MTV really played havoc on artists.

If you're in music just to become a big, fat rock star, then I probably don't like your music to begin with.

Will Arnett and I were never in the same room, but once I saw early animation we started writing music for that and then he just kind of did his little rap over top, some of it was free form and some of it I made up, we all just kind of contributed to it.

With MTV in the '80s, you made your album but then you needed to use any money you made to create a video - instead of being able to use that money to pay for you and your band to live on while you wrote new songs. So MTV upped the ante of looking for one hit. Conceptual bands who didn't have a hit were going to lose.

TV series, there's a lot of everybody talking to you and giving you input for the first couple episodes, and then they're on such a crazy schedule that you get another episode on a Monday, you have to have it done by Friday and it becomes very solitary work usually, TV shows.

What makes games so exciting is that's a whole other- there's all sorts of other considerations on what music is supposed to achieve and what you're attempting to support, it's not uncommon to think of your music and to think of the way your orchestra plays for something like Jack and Daxter where you start with- you know because it has to change tempo and intensity as the action gets more intense.

With vinyl you had twenty-two minutes per side. CDs came along, and you had sixty, seventy, eighty minutes and people felt like they had to fill them up. They were like those Fuji apples from Japan. They look like perfect, super-gigantic versions of American apples.