A Quote by Derren Brown
When I started doing magic I was quite obsessive about it. I didn't feel impressive and I had a strong desire to impress people. I was putting all my creative energy into learning and performing tricks, and it helps if you're not in relationships or doing the stuff other people are doing. But it's not necessarily a healthy way of living.
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One thing you learn doing magic tricks for a living is how close every performance of every magic trick is to disaster. There are no robust magic tricks. They're all hanging from a thread - sometimes literally.
I feel like I've been doing performing my entire life. I started taking music lessons and singing when I was about ten. I didn't have one of those creepy stage moms that made me do stuff. I started bands at a pretty young age and played with my friends back in Detroit. I've always known that I wanted to do this. It was all I was ever interested in doing. I never had, outside of music, any extracurricular activities that I took part in.
I'm just gonna be doing stuff that I really enjoy doing. I'm not gonna attempt to be current in any way other than the fact that people will like what I'm doing currently.
I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird stuff that no one had ever done before.
In terms of my career, it began in earnest when I was living in Boston. I started doing my own films, working initially as an editor and editing assistant - briefly - at WGBH, as an editor on other people's movies, trying to get some experience under my belt, but eventually just doing my own short films, doing them my way.
Many people take exception to me and say that I'm doing black magic and things they can't do at church. But I'm doing magic that started their church.
Magic is like special effects live, and I love to perform, so it sounded like doing magic tricks were a good way to entertain people.
If you have a strong sense of who you are and what you're doing, then it's actually easier to work with other people, because you don't have to worry about them or yourself. You're just worrying about getting the best product, and all that other stuff is out of the way.
I trained myself by doing other people's songs in clubs way back when. And so I have no pride about doing covers. I love it. And being a song interpreter, to me, is just as important as, you know, putting your own thing out there. It's all about the soul - where the soul comes from.
Since my act is a goofy reflection of what's going on in my life, I started doing pot jokes, and I noticed that audiences invariably love pot jokes. Even people who don't smoke pot think it's a funny subject. So when I started getting laughs, I started doing more material about it. When people come to see my shows, there are a lot of stoners in the audience, but there are also a lot of people who just like me. So I try to give a healthy mix, where people aren't going "There are too many jokes about pot!" or "There's not enough jokes about pot!"
I started doing makeup to make a living. Then I said, You're not supposed to be putting powder on other people. You're supposed to be powdering yourself.
We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing. If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people’s choices. If I feel good about my body, I don’t go around making fun of other people’s weight or appearance. We’re hard on each other because we’re using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived deficiency.
I can't say I ever wanted to become an entertainer. I already was one, sort of-around the house, at school, doing my magic tricks, throwing my voice and doing Popeye impersonations. People thought I was funny; so I kind of took entertaining for granted It was inevitable that I'd start giving little performances.
I wrote as a teenager, and once I started acting, you know, you're learning lines, you're doing other people's words, it takes up a lot of time. Especially if you're dedicated to what you're doing, you're trying to do a decent job at it. But I would have said to myself, "Write more, please."
My very first movie, 'Mary Poppins,' which I talk about, it just turned me into an obsessive, creative creature who had to sort of reply to the experience by drawing things, making things. It was like it forced - it made me into this obsessive, creative creature... I don't know any other way of putting it.
I started performing when I was 9 or 10, doing magic.
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