My training as an engineer has enabled me to design the stuff, but the reason I do it is not to make music but for the opportunity to work with musicians.
Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious.
Over the years, I've realized that I have as much in common with the performance artist, the standup comedian, the screenwriter, as I do with the theologian. I'm in an odd world where I make things and share them with people.
In the case of 'Fish,' I did the writing, design, and code all at the same time, so the form and the content were fused together. I'd change some words, get an idea, change some code, see if it worked, change more words, and so on.
The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.
I'm a designer, but I rely on programmers to bring my ideas to life. By learning to code myself, I think I can make things easier for all of us. Similarly, I want to be able to build things on my own without having to bother a programmer.
I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.
I found collaborating with congenial doctors about problems that physicists could help solve was very satisfying. I also like educating anybody who would listen!
I'm not a scientist. What I find interesting about my work is how, as a designer, I sit between science and the consumer and can see both a need and a solution.
In my life, it's always been about who I'm going to collaborate with. Less important to me is what the subject is.
As it happens, although I was at MIT on the faculty full-time for 18 years and then at Harvard for another 16, so I've always been in full-time academia, I always found it was both beneficial for my research and beneficial for the other work to be involved in the practicing community.
There are people from lots of different fields in my department. In my lab, they come from computer science, education, psychophysics, psychology, music - and we all work together, and it feels very comfortable. All the careers I've had have been interdisciplinary; working in a studio is like being an engineer and a musician and a therapist.
In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I've done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught.
Magicians are typically introverted; they don't tend to work with others, but I work with software programmers, composers, designers, so it's a very diverse group and the result is always more interesting than something I could have done by myself.
I come out of an academic background, and I'm aware that what I'm doing is simultaneously research and fiction. I want to meet both those obligations.
I teach in the medical school, the School of Public Health, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Business School. And it's the best perch... because most of my work crosses boundaries.
I think it's good to have a nice, healthy group of people all doing different things. A lot of my friends don't even work in Hollywood; they just happen to live in L.A.
The different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices.
I think Caltech fills a unique role, and it's not a cheap one. Their small size allows them to do interdisciplinary work a lot more effectively than anyplace else I know. The bigger universities get cast into silos.
Theatre, film and television are all modes of storytelling, and many of us are fortunate enough to move freely among them without feeling that we've 'left' or need to 'go back' to one or the other. In fact, if the theatre is to avoid a brain drain, this kind of fluidity is increasingly necessary.
I wanted to do 'Manzanar' because I'd never done anything like it before. The spoken word there is between a drama and an essay, and I'd never worked in concert with an orchestra.
There are things that I will always shoot, but now that the modeling and acting worlds are becoming very close, you can do a little bit of one and more of the other.
