I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I'm going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about.
I want the people looking at my work to feel a sense of all the possibilities of painting, and, through that, in life as a whole. When that happens, I feel I've accomplished something useful.
If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.
If you're not doing something right, you can feel it on stage, and if it isn't going well, the audience will tell you. A teacher can teach you sense memory and this and that, but until you get in front of an audience, you don't really feel it.
When you feel so strongly about something and other people feel equally strongly, you have to feel stronger about it in order to succeed.
The problem with a lot of movies when it comes to race is that they want to be moral, and they want to make the audience feel good about something that a lot of people don't feel good about.
Product development is emotional for me! It's really important as a brand that we feel that our products are going to be life-changing for everyone who buys them. We won't ever launch something we don't feel strongly about.
Sometimes I will tweet things without an audience in mind at all, just because I want to say something that I don't feel I can say otherwise. Those tweets have a specific sense of desperation to them, because I write them when I feel like I don't have anyone else to talk to - as if Twitter is the only thing that will accept my insanely inappropriate thoughts without judgement.
My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.
The key is to constantly keep the audience surprised. If they feel like something is going to happen, or they think from an educational standpoint that something is about to happen because of all the moving parts, it is your job to break that expectation and show the audience something different.
If you feel strongly about something and you want to voice your opinion, I feel it's your right, so, that's how I look at it because that's how life is.
In my relationship with God, I've learned that if I follow a 'formula' for how I spend my time with Him, then I'm just accomplishing a checklist of things I feel obligated to do to please Him. This makes my spiritual life more about doing what I need to do to fulfill an obligation than something meaningful.
Is it possible to do something that that makes an audience uncomfortable, challenges them, makes them see things they're not used to? Here in these films [Salome the play and Salomaybe], I have the opportunity to say something about how I feel about things.
I watch films, so I know what it is to be there in a theatre as the audience. So I always want to communicate with them when I make films, but that is not the only thing. I also want to say something which I feel deeply, and which I feel I can connect with the rest of the audience.
If you feel strongly about someone, go up to them. Pursue what you want in life. Why be shy about something like that?
I used to feel an obligation to invent things. I felt I was a failure because I didn't do massive great novels about Australia or the outback or something. I just don't feel that any more.
If you are in your everyday life, and you feel like you just accomplished something big that you had going on, then that's Beast Mode. It's an accomplishment, that you put yourself through something to get something better out of it. I feel that that's Beast Mode.