My favorite part about my job is not that it is never boring; it is that it is always exciting. There is always something new to learn. There is always something interesting to get from someone else. Whether it is an actor, or a sound engineer, there is so much to learn and there will never be nothing to learn. There is always something there.
I always knew I was going to do something with music, but with my whole family being in the business, acting was something that was just mine. But when I was 20 or 21, I started writing songs and felt the itch to make a record.
I use improvisation as a writing tool to help produce material that goes into a script, but a well-crafted script shouldn't sound scripted, and oftentimes people confuse something that looks like improvisation for what is actually a very well-written script that is well-acted.
Let there be music in the home. If you have teenagers who have their own recordings, you will be prone to describe the sound as something other than music. Let them occasionally hear something better. Expose them to it. It will speak for itself. More of appreciation will come than you may think. It may not be spoken, but it will be felt, and its influence will become increasingly manifest as the years pass.
When I started studying acting in New York, I didn't plan to be an action hero. I just wanted to learn acting because I felt it was something I needed to try to do for myself, to express something, my inner pain, or something I couldn't get out.
What I look for in a script is something that challenges me, something that breaks new ground, something that allows me to flex my director muscle. You have got to think fast in this business, you've got to keep reinventing yourself to stay on top.
I've always found that when you're trying to create illusions with sound, especially in a science fiction or fantasy movie, that pulling sounds from the world around us is a great way to cement that illusion because you can go out and record an elevator in George Lucas's house or something, and it will have that motor sound.
So something I've felt I've learned with The Cosmopolitans shoot is using some agility and changing things quickly. That's something I found really useful on this shoot too. The gestation of The Cosmopolitans and this are slightly different from my other films. The script would be done and I'd be cutting it, but I wasn't always writing new material.
What I look for in a script is something that challenges me, something that breaks new ground, something that allows me to flex my director muscle. You have got to think fast in this business, youve got to keep reinventing yourself to stay on top.
I want to do something where the script is there. That doesn't mean that I won't need to come in, or be asked to come in, and help develop something. Things can always get better. There's always room for improvement. But, I want to do something that's the best version of whatever it's supposed to be.
Choose a love and work to make it true, and somehow, something will happen, something you couldn’t plan, will come along to move like to like, to set you loose, to set you on the way to your next brick wall.
When I started Virgin from a basement in west London, there was no great plan or strategy. I didn't set out to build a business empire ... For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that's going to make a real difference to other people's lives.
When I started Virgin from a basement in west London, there was no great plan or strategy. I didn't set out to build a business empire... For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that's going to make a real difference to other people's lives.
I love directing; it felt right to me when I did 'Flying Lessons'. It's something I will do again. Really, you can always be working and developing. That's something that's kind of ever constant.
Music is something I must do, business is something I need to do, and Africa is something I have to do. That's the way it breaks down in my life.
You're limited to one image, but you can have 50 audio tracks. It's something you'd be foolish not to experiment with. So I'm also very interested in sound that happens offscreen. I think that's a way to expand the scope of the movie. And it's all very planned out from the script stage. For me, sound design is a major part of the narrative. I think that's what makes working with certain people on the producer level difficult.