I'm not someone who doesn't want to see the films, but I like to see them as an end product when the whole nuance of the character is put together.
I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons.
The main problem with films is that everybody always thinks of us as a violent people. We are not. We are spiritual. And when you show someone without a sense of humor or families, which is the way you usually see Indians in movies, then they are without a spiritual base and become subhuman.
I have done so many films in which either I have been the main lead or part of the supporting cast.
I think what people don't realize is the transition from NXT to the main roster is a big jump. It's getting a whole new audience familiar with a certain character. If you debut too many women at one time, it's hard for the audience to get to know, understand, and see the rise of that character.
If an autoimmune disease can create symptoms that look exactly like schizophrenia, that raises the question, what is schizophrenia? And are there forms of schizophrenia that are caused by other types of autoimmune disease?
I didn't see films when I was young. I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn't have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me. I started totally free and crazy and innocent. Now I've seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don't do commercials, I don't do films pre-prepared by other people, I don't do star system. So I do my own little thing.
I like to see people put themselves into films, which is part of the reason why I love Woody Allen films so much - I believe his actors' work. I have a feeling that many actors in his films are similar to their characters, and I like that.
You want, in a sense, to relate to the main character, so often, the main character POV is a bit more of a blank slate.
It's very rare that you get to play a character over the course of so many films. Bella meant a lot to me and she will always be such a formative event in my career. I grew up with her and she and I have been on this great journey together. I also see many parallels between her evolution and my own because I lived through so many things along the way while playing Bella and having this connection to so many people involved in making the films over the years. It would be impossible for me to separate my world from Bella's.
Think of every character as a main character. They believe they're the main characters in their stories. No one should just be an obstacle.
Obviously, I try to make the films work for an audience. That's the main point of making a film, and in retrospect, one can see that certain films, let's say Leaving Las Vegas, demonstrated its own success.
Everybody is a main character to someone
When writers don't know what to do with a character, they build up the supporting cast and universe to kind of hide that fact. After a while, you can no longer see the character for the underbrush. When that happens, you need to bring out the weed-whacker to clear some of that away so you can focus on the main character.
No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.
My thumbprint is on every single thing that happens with Hellboy. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do professionally, letting someone else draw the main Hellboy comic. He's so much mine. But I still have no intention of ever handing over the writing of the main Hellboy comic to someone else. That character is my baby.