I went to the Wharton School of Finance, the toughest place to get into. I was a great student.
I ended up getting to do a lot of student films - no budget: somebody just wrangled up a camera and went to shoot stuff - and it was fun. It was great.
I think my mom and dad both wanted to get across to me that... I obviously grew up with great privilege and was very lucky and was able to afford college and not have student loans, and they would pay for college, but beyond that, it would be up to me to make a living.
There are wonderful films that become studio films, but they're conceived independently. That's where the action is. 'Being John Malkovich' is a great example of a picture you wouldn't think the studios would want, and it turns out to be a movie that touches everybody's heart.
A lot of big studio films, which are fun and great, tend to have a formula, and you've seen it before, and it's a new version of it.
I feel like I'm in a weird state, and I wake up in Hollywood, and I've got a couple of studio movies underneath my belt, and I take these meetings with people. Sometimes it's this great, weird sense of oddness that comes at you, because I've never really stopped thinking the way that I started thinking.
The end of the studio system signalled the end of the great screen stars. They were the sort of actors who brought their own charismatic personas to each role they played. Audiences felt as if they knew them immediately every time they watched one of their movies.
I miss the New York bagel but miss the New York bialy even more. It's a great compromise of bagel feeling with less dough stuffing.
That's the ultimate goal of most turkey recipes: to create a great skin and stuffing to hide the fact that turkey meat, in its cooked state, is dry and flavorless. Does it have to be that way? No. We just have to focus on what the turkey is and what the turkey needs.
If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine and still is.
I stumbled upon Charles White purely by chance while looking through a book 'Great Negroes, Past and Present' in the library at Forty-Ninth Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. I was in the fifth grade.
Stumbling upon the next great invention in an 'ah-ha!' moment is a myth.
Sin and forgiveness and falling and getting back up and losing the pearl of great price in the couch cushions but then finding it again, and again, and again? Those are the stumbling steps to becoming Real, the only script that's really worth following in this world or the one that's coming.
Racism may be as systemic as it always was. It is the great problem of America. It's the one stumbling block that I don't believe was ever smoothed over.
Fear is a great motivator. Look at what 9-11 has accomplished - My god. It's slammed the economy, It's - I can't even begin to detail all it's actually done, other than bring down the buildings and hit the Pentagon. It's stunned the entire nation.
In music, which was my world before, you've got thousands and thousands of years of great ideas that have already been thought of. But the internet is basically 20 years old. So you can be way stupider and still have world-changing ideas.
If you want to communicate something, you'd better make sure that your design piece is well-dressed and that its teeth are fixed. At the same time, I still believe that if it is only stylistically great and it has nothing to say, it still is not going to make a lasting impression on anybody.
The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the '30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand.
And I said - Styx - as a musical group it is our place to reflect the light that is shining on us back onto this place and say - this is where so much great stuff started.
Chairing any Appropriations subcommittee is both a great honor and weighty responsibility.
