Our cinema is coming of age, and people are realizing we need to tell different stories differently and in fresh manner and not just do formula stuff and serve it to the audience.
Every generation has a changing of the guard in media. We do the same stuff that everybody else does, but we just do it differently. We do our content online differently. We do our magazines differently. We do our TV differently. We never had anyone tell us how to do magazines, so we just developed it in a different way.
I constantly think as an artist, as a rapper of what are the stories you want to tell? They can't all be, "I'm ill, I'm fresh, look at me, I have money." At some point, when you have an audience for it, there are stories that need to be told.
I mean, we shoot differently, we cut differently, our stories are different . . . I'd say that every single thing is different except for the fact that you watch it on a TV or a computer or a phone, just like you do with everybody else's content.
I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren't just kid stuff.
The American formula things are out there but they don't have any stories to tell - we have all the stories to tell - but they're all formula.
We love Formula One and think Formula One's great. But we think Formula E is different. We would be making a big mistake if we tried to compete with Formula One and be similar to Formula One, we have to be radically different to Formula One to have a chance of survival. I don't mean survival by beating Formula One but co-existing complimentary to Formula One.
I feel like a lot of the stuff coming out right now just feels really inauthentic to me. But apparently, people don't seem to see through it. And this makes me sound bitter, but it's just my perspective. I'm not bitter. I just feel like there's a lot of stuff that doesn't feel like it's coming from a place of any sort of integrity. It just doesn't feel like it's coming from the heart, basically. It just feels like it's being produced because people know it's a formula that will work, or it's easily digestible and fun to look at.
When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.
I just want to tell stories that are meaningful and have inspiration to them; people can watch it and take away something or maybe they'll just think about themselves differently, or thing about the world differently. I just want to create characters that live on.
It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication - whether it's TV, movies, or books - begins with somebody wanting to tell a story. That need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones.
But the general audience, if you want to grow your audience you need to tell stories, you need to have characters, and that's how you bring them in. That's my favorite part of the business.
I think every man and woman is a star. It's just a matter of realizing and becoming it. It's all a matter of willpower. The world is just how you see it. If you want to have other people tell you how to see it, then you can. But if you want to look at it differently, then it's limitless what you can do. That's why I don't feel the need to be one person. I can be as many people as I like.
I just want to tell stories that are meaningful and have inspiration to them; people can watch it and take away something, or maybe they'll just think about themselves differently or think about the world differently. I just want to create characters that live on.
We all act differently in certain places. We don't want to admit it, but we're different where we grew up than we are with our family and than we are with the guys that we went to college with or our fraternity brothers. People just exist differently. It's small, subtle things, but different colors come out. That's all there is to it.
We need to have points of view from lots of different types of people. People who have different backgrounds, different parts of the world, who maybe perceive gender differently. We're in this time where we have social media, we have the ability to share so much, that I think that we need to create more space and more opportunity for people that are just outside of the typical cliched binary roles.
The goal of Participant is to tell stories that serve as catalysts for social change. With our television channel, we can bring those stories into the homes of our viewers every day.