I do not know if it is true that all actors want to direct and all directors want to act, but in 1972 I tried directing and decided I had better stick to acting.
I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
I'm not a real good musician, but I can write [a song] pretty well. I experiment once in a while to see what I can do. I find out the best I can do is stay with ballads.
Half the shows on Comedy Central are just multi-cam blue sets, and they kind of look like game shows from the '90s. It's like, 'Why do such a bland corporate aesthetic when the sky's the limit with what you can do?'
If you asked me to make a Gaslight Anthem album on my own, I would say, 'No way, that's crazy.' I would never have been able to do that.
It's easier for me to write certain character types because of my own life experiences, but I find it too artistically limiting to only write about red-headed kids who grew up in small town Montana. That's really part of the fun of fantasy, I think. Our imagination is basically unlimited. Okay, that's a terrifying thing about fantasy, too.
Throughout history, self-styled arbiters have taken it upon themselves to decide the question of what can or cannot be the legitimate purview of art.
If I wanted to make spy movies for the rest of my life, that would be one thing, but I don't want to just make spy movies.
A lot of my stand-up early on was stories from my childhood. And my childhood is over - there's not new childhood stories to come. They've all been mentioned.
I'm a spiritual musician, I think there has been enough political musicians and I think everything that can be said has been said about political, social things, you know, and there's still some more to be said but not much.
I am fascinated a) by transgressive art and b) what happens beyond the boundaries.
When I'm directing a film, I can't do any more than appear in a song.
Having some decent musicians around you only expands what you can do production-wise, but I make rap - I can't really see myself doing much else.
Most directors prefer to direct everything themselves. I thought I could on Lord Of The Rings, but very quickly found out that the sheer scale prevented it.
When you're with WWE, you are operating within very fine boundaries that you cannot step outside of.
When I moved to Hollywood, I was expecting it to be this Mecca of extraordinarily talented musicians, and it was instead the era of Faster Pussycat and bands that had an appeal, but I couldn't do anything like that. There's nothing in my being that can do anything like that.
The criteria for writing mythological books are different. Because the results are known, the end is known. Somebody has created that limit and you have to play within that limit.
Without the word dream, or the concept dream, and without the word blue and the emotions, I would have been really limited in the things I've written and performed.
Two years ago I focused on one apartment to see how many variations you can come up with in a given space with the same parameters. I would work on this repeatedly for days and you see that there is maybe seven hundred options for one space. This exercise gives you an idea of the degree at which you can interpret the organization of space, it is not infinite but it's very large.
The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
I cannot do more than two films at a time. I like to have a life besides films. That is very important to me.
If there are similarities, it's simply because the same thoughts that occurred to other people also occurred to me. I'd be astonished if anyone could come up with any truly original powers that were at all interesting any more.
I'm a choreographer and a director, and I have no ambition beyond that.
I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.
For me, the question was, how can one take a live-action performance and put it in the parameter of one of those cartoons? How much can you get away with?
