I've been to Sundance eight times as a publicist and thought I was very prepared. I mean, who could've been more prepared for me? A publicist who's been there eight times. Getting there as a filmmaker was a completely surreal, different, unexpected experience.
My stated goal as a filmmaker is to feel something. Is to have a palpable emotion in my life, carry it through the gauntlet of the filmmaking process and try and have it land for an audience at some point during the viewing experience. That to me is successful filmmaking.
I get mad at myself when I get news from Twitter before I get it from a regular news source. Then I'm off to a bad start: getting the second-hand, filtered experience all day long.
I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.
Experience alone can give a final answer. The knowledge gained in a few years by a commission of the kind suggested would be worth more than volumes of mere assertions and contradictions.
I feel like if you enjoyed the 119 hours that precede the finale of 'Lost,' is that whole experience ruined by the fact that you might not agree with everything that we did in the finale? I would hope not! I would hope that you would appreciate the fact that you were entertained for 119 hours even if you didn't love the finale.
The first think I did when I found out I was a finalist, was, I don't remember, because it felt like it was an out of body experience.
I do still have some of the experience from playing, but it's been so long since I've been out in those quarters, semis, finals, the important final matches, just against the top players.
Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.
Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't.
To experience the northern forest in the raw, I went to northern Finland and Lapland, travelling on horseback, and sleeping on reindeer skins in the traditional open-fronted Finnish laavu. I ate elk heart, reindeer and lingonberries, and tried out spruce resin: the chewing gum of the Stone Age.
The fun of sitting around Pangong Lake with 40 guys around a fireplace, having a glass of wine... staying in one camp together... that's an experience. Waking up at 5 in the morning, watching the sun come up. You don't do these things in Bombay.
Some of the choicest blessings of my life have been the close friendships I have experienced over the years. Often, these friendships have been forged in the fires of shared experience.
Since my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task. I needed some way to share the experience directly.
'What's My Line' 1971 was a magical experience as I was still in my teens, and it was my first appearance. You know how they say you never forget 'your first'!
Every now and then I'm in a situation where someone doesn't recognize me, and I experience racism. Things like not being buzzed into a store or sitting in first class on a plane and having someone ask to see my ticket four times.
I maybe had a first love and had my heart broken, but reflecting on it, I don't think that was love. I think as I'm getting older and having more in-depth relationships, maybe I'll experience it. At the moment, I don't know, exactly, if I've been in love.
I know at first-hand the importance of hard work and the value of work experience.
I am an enthusiastic European, and my first-hand experience of war and hatred has strengthened that conviction. I have seen how misguided unilateral nationalistic identities have brought destruction and death. I am, however, a world citizen, too.
Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.
