I'd forgotten I'd done the anime called Spirited Away, the English version of a Japanese film.
A lot affects the outcome. It boils down to scheduling and the commitment of the network.
The ebulliently sharp mind of 'White Christmas' director Walter Bobbie made me tremble and strive in the same breath. The deceptively 'simple' dialogue of David Ives, asking every actor to just. say. it. Float it on the breeze; it doesn't need 'explanation,' just energy and truth.
Kids now are so used to surround sound and the power in theater speakers, that the concert hall is a disappointment to them.
You hear the same work by different orchestras, different conductors, violinists, pianists, singers, and slowly, the work reveals itself and begins to live deeper in you.
In television you go in with this operating system that it is a crapshoot.
Fun can happen on the interior. Nobody knows about it, but there are fireworks going on inside your spirit when you hear a great orchestra playing great music.
Cogsworth, the character I did on 'Beauty and the Beast,' could be a bit flamboyant onscreen, because basically, he is a cartoon. But they didn't want Cogsworth to become Disney's gay character, because it got around a gay man was playing him.
I will never master this craft. Orchestras are very, very forthcoming with me.
I wish to spend my life's twilight being just who I am. I could claim noble reasons as coming out in order to move gay rights forward, but I must admit it is for far more selfish reasons. Now is the time I wish to find someone, and I do not desire to force any potential partner to live a life of extreme discretion with me.
Very often, I don't make it through moments of recording because it is genuinely funny and absolutely ridiculous that a 60-year-old grown man is making these noises.
I had a meeting in LA in which they took a really overstuffed hour and a half. It was as close to old Hollywood as I remembered it in the last 20 years.
We lament the speed of our society and the lack of depth and the nature of disposable information.
I've played Lear three times, I would love to do it again.
People ordinarily don't think of their orchestras as important as we'd like them to be. People don't care about their friends and neighbors who sit down to commit excellence three or four times a year, but they will go see the tall bald guy with three names from television.
Something happens to us all when we experience something as a unit that doesn't occur when we're on our couches or holding our little portable DVD players.
I am certainly not a mainstream religious man.
The simple act of sitting down and playing something enormously complex and spiritually uplifting on a harpsichord just bores kids to tears. There's no sizzle, there's no grab. But it's the great lesson of serious music, that it invites you to listen, rather than demands that you listen.
Very often when I go in to meet for movies or pilots, I'm put on videotape. I hate the notion that that tape is going to sit on a shelf and never get better.
