I remember, years ago, if I had had an opportunity to leave the Lakers, I would have left for one reason: because I did not like an owner that was not telling me the truth. And it would have made no difference what they would have offered me; I would have left.
The Lakers had been home to me, unlike the home I had grown up and felt apart from.
I'm as old as the moon and the stars, and as young as the trees and the lakes. My style comes from looking at what came before me, and from visiting a lot of places.
I love taking the salads I get from those crazy organic delivery places and putting them on a plate and then roasting my own lamb to put on top. I balance it well. And listen, if I'm not eating Waffle House and Taco Bell and Jack in the Box, anything will make me lose weight.
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
'Silence Of The Lambs' was not something people expected me to do.
Don't ask who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
The whole Orion zeitgeist, of treating filmmakers as partners, to me it's inseparable from the success of 'Silence of the Lambs'.
For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.
For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now.
Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.
I very much admired Lancaster. George Clooney reminds me of him today. Not all the macho, swinging around that Burt used to do, but the courage. You know where you stand with men like that.
I'm not on a mission. I'm not a paragon of health for anybody. I'm not going to run a marathon or model for 'Men's Health' or go on bike rides with Lance Armstrong. I'm not. Trust me.
That period afterwards, just hating being the winner of the Tour de France, hating cycling, hating the media for asking me questions about Lance Armstrong.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
And I realized, when I'd come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time.
It really surprises me that people in this day and age still write such busy music and fill up every space with layer upon layer of sound... it's like musical landfill.
Supermarkets didn't even want to talk to me about how much food they were wasting. I'd been round the back. I'd seen bins full of food being locked and then trucked off to landfill sites, and I thought, surely there is something more sensible to do with food than waste it.
I like 'Goodbye My Lover' because it's a really personal song and I recorded it in my landlady's bathroom in Los Angeles. She had a piano in there and for me listening back to it, it actually sounds like the voice I hear in my head. It's so close to what I can imagine.
My landlady, who is only a tailor's widow, reads her Milton; and tells me, that her late husband first fell in love with her on this very account: because she read Milton with such proper emphasis.
