Villains are always the best roles, but that meant that for months afterwards, all I got offered were absolute cads and bounders and really nasty pieces of work, as well as a lot of people who only had one arm. Such is the limited imaginative power, you see, of a great many casting directors.
The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world.
I've only met LeBron casually. He's always been great to me. I think I've been great and cordial to him, but this notion that we have to be friends - we're never gonna be friends. And that's not a negative thing.
I was pretty strict in high school about who I would listen to. Musicians like Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell... who were, in my opinion, great writers. The music mattered, but it held hands with the lyrics, and the personality was, overall, unsullied.
Great cataclysmic things can go by and neither the orchestra nor the conductor are under the delusion that whether they make this or that gesture is going to be the deciding factor in how it comes out.
Working with Woody Allen was extremely gratifying. He has such a vast catalog of great work that doing one of his films was somewhat unreal.
Living in Georgia, I never wanted to model. But I had the travel bug big time when I was young. I think because I had an all-American look, I was great for catalogs. They constantly sent me overseas for editorial, but I would always come back with catalog jobs. I was fine with that. It served my purpose to see the world.
And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.
It's an unfortunate situation. After such a great play I felt like I got hit late, no flag, broke my hand. That's it. That's pretty much been the story for the past three weeks, and obviously at some point something catastrophic was going to happen, and I broke my hand.
Drag is great way to get people to pay attention to me, but it's a difficult way to get people to take me seriously as a musician. So it's a weird Catch-22. It's like a gimmick that gets them to pay attention, but when they see my image, they're like, 'There's no way this is going to have any legitimacy to it.'
The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own.
And you have a record company behind it, this is a key too, you need people to fight for your records, at least a little bit. So if you have a great song, it's catchy, and you've got a little bit of help, I think that's all you need. But there hasn't been that in music.
I just want to make great music. There's not a genre that I would categorize it as, but I want it to be true and authentic.
If I categorized home runs that I've seen, without a doubt the monumental one is Henry's... but I've seen a lot of classic, great home runs. Gibson's was probably the most theatrical home run I've ever seen.
I think one of the great dangers here is going and categorizing anybody from one religion as a terrorist. That's not true... That would let the terrorists win. That's what they want us to do.
I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don't put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work.
'Death In Paradise' is my dream job - a fascinating character, great scripts, superb cast, and shooting in the Caribbean with French catering.
'Catfish' is a great project that we have a blast doing, and it's really fun and at the zeitgeist in the world - certainly in the U.S., hopefully in the U.K. and I imagine the rest of the world. Being at the centre of this discussion and this subject has been really incredible as both a filmmaker and someone who likes to participate in pop culture.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
