Richard Donner made great movies. Seminal movies. The Academy, though, and we have to be careful here, should recognize popular films. Popular films are what make it all work. There was a time when popular movies were commercial movies, and they were good movies, and they had to be good movies. There was no segregation between good independent films and popular movies.
I wouldn't be doing motherfu**ing films for almost three decades if every time I did something that someone didn't like I went in a fu**ing cocoon and just hid there and didn't make my art.
'Alien?' Oh, yeah. I still get fanmail almost every week, pictures from all over the world on that movie. That's one of the most popular films I've done.
Perhaps not unusually for a popular film produced over three decades ago, there have been a dizzying parade of corporate characters trading rights to 'This Is Spinal Tap' through the years. Yet our requests for timely statements of the film's income have been met with a series of slammed doors.
We've been around for almost three decades now - there's about three generations of Bon Jovi fans.
Mattel stepped up and changed the face of Barbie. Barbie looks a lot different than she did decades ago. Or even three weeks ago.
We've been living under outdated immigration rules from decades ago. They're decades and decades old.
On a musical level, I do find it rewarding. It's not like I want to blow my brains out while I'm playing these songs from so long ago. I am still surprised by the way the songs are constructed - note choices, the way the arrangements are made, the way these songs are assembled. I'm still amazed at times.
I was immersed in popular songs of the time, of the '30s and '40s. I was writing songs, making fun of the attitudes of those songs, in the musical style of the songs themselves; love songs, folk songs, marches, football.
In the last two or three decades, there's been a feminization of the man in popular media that I've never really understood.
When I was watching 'Sivaji,' I had no clue I will be a filmmaker; I had not even started making short films at that time.
Although I was writing songs when I was younger, I didn't feel I had much of a clue as to what I was doing or how I was doing it. There are a few songs from my past where I thought, 'Well, that's pretty decent,' but I didn't have a discipline. I suppose I'm kind of a late bloomer.
The problem is that nowadays, with so much information flying around, it is almost impossible to remember anything you saw just a week ago, never mind three years ago!
Medicare is a promise we made to seniors more than four decades ago. When President Johnson signed Medicare into law, one in three seniors lived in poverty. Half of seniors had no health coverage at all.
I moved when I was 16. I had no clue what to expect in moving to L.A. I had no clue, really, about what acting was. I just knew that I wanted to do it.
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.