I was brought up on a council estate in the countryside near Stoke Prior in Worcestershire, but I adored visiting the farm where my father worked.
When I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the neighborhood girls would sit on the stoop and sing. I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.
The son has always felt like he was a footnote in one of the stories the father tells. The father is an amazing storyteller and one of the tales that he tells is how he met his wife.
When I was growing up, my father would not allow me to get a perm, so I straightened my hair for special occasions.
My parents met because my father was an actor friend of one of my mom's brothers, but my mother has never set foot on the stage - she's quite shy. So it's a strange thing because people say, 'Oh, coming from acting parents,' when the idea of acting would literally make my mother just want to throw up.
My father was a certain kind of man - I saw how he treated my mother and his family and how he treated strangers. And I vowed I would never make a film that would not reflect properly on my father's name.
When I came out to my parents, I knew that they knew. My father was like, 'Are you sure?' I literally said, 'You took me to see Barbra Streisand at Madison Square Garden.'
I don't think you could change my father; he is a very strong character. He believes totally in honesty.
I couldn't stand back and watch the strong economy that my father envisioned go to ruins.
My heroes always are mostly my parents - my father especially, and my mom, who's passed on already. My dad is a very strong man, and by him being educated, and a principal and school superintendent over 37 years, he plays such a big role in my life.
Gorillas remind me of my father. He was a very big, physically strong man but also very sensitive.
I come from a RSS family. My father was a strong supporter of the RSS, and he was a swayamsewak of the Palwal Shakha.
My mother was an artist and highly strung, whereas my father was much calmer.
I love my mother. My mother made sure, her stubbornness - she made sure we was going to eat. She made sure we had Christmases. That was my mother. My father wasn't there for that.
My father came from an intellectual and studious avenue as opposed to a brawler's avenue. So I had to go further afield and I brought all kinds of unscrupulous oiks back home - earless, toothless vagabonds - to teach me the arts of the old bagarre.
Even as a child, I would get film offers, and all my friends would tease me saying, 'You will also be an actor like your father,' or 'Don't forget us.' I always took it as a joke, but subconsciously, I felt maybe this was my true calling.
The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.
Those who submit like a child do it because they know that the Father wants only the happiness of His children and that only He knows the way. That is the testimony we must have to keep praying like a submissive child, in the good times as well as the times of trouble.
In 2001, my father finally succumbed to the bone cancer that had tortured him for seven years. His last weeks were a terrible, black icing on the cake, the agony, the slow twisting, thinning and snapping of his skeleton. Everything fell apart.
When my father was a young actor, it is absolutely true that the vast majority were fairly middle class. Then all of a sudden, people like Albert Finney burst through and turned all that on its head.
