I'm an old guy, so I started out playing 'Pong' with my brothers, and 'Mario Bros.' and whatnot. But we really got involved and got intense when 'Tecmo Super Bowl' came out. That's when we really started playing video games, and it got intense.
There's video footage of my 10th birthday where I'm wearing, like, a little pink T-shirt. Then my dad comes in brandishing a copy of 'Eraserhead,' going, 'Look what we've got for tonight!'
When you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.
I found a lot of stuff that's never been seen before. That was the goal: to not use cliché Cold War footage but give people a sense of the place and setting. It's a field you still need. At first it was a lot of fun, and then later it became a little bit intimidating. "Oh my God, I've got so much footage. Where am I going to put it? What am I going to do?" I ended up really only reviewing about 20 to 30 percent of what I had. So it was a task.
I was once an extra in a Bruce Springsteen video where they did a live performance video at Tramps. I forget the name of the song.
I had some pretty weird fan mail growing up, sometimes from prison and wherever else. Nothing too intense. Some superfans that maybe went a little overboard with gifts and whatnot, expecting something other than what it could be with a kid. That's a little weird. But at the same time, it's like, "Hey, I'm getting free video games. I'm not going to return it if you sent it!" Thankfully we never felt unsafe.
It's funny; before I started writing professionally, I had a job logging video footage for behind-the-scenes footage for special features.
With every project I start out on, there's no footage. It's always a big slog to find the footage.
As for that footage, video footage showing the dead children allegedly killed in the chemical attack, it is horrible. The question is only who did it and what they did, and who is responsible for this. These pictures do not answer the questions I have just posed. There is an opinion that it's a compilation by these very rebels, who are connected with al-Qaida and who were always distinguished by exceptional brutality.
Of course, growing up, I was a big fan of rap so that was something that I got into. I was a fan of a lot of artists. You can be a fan, but at the same time, you gotta carve your own swagger and carve out your own style.
I've got my own studio, and I've got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I've got stuff that's electronic, orchestral, jazz, I've got rock, I've got metal, you know, I don't have polka.
My sheets had never been so clean as they had in the past few months. I hardly got them on again before something else happened and I was feverishly ripping them off and stuffing them in the wash with double amounts of soap and all the "extra" buttons pushed: extra wash, extra rinse, extra water, extra spin, extra protection against things that go bump in the night.
Honestly, I was a fan before I got the opportunity to be an artist. I was the kind of fan who would stand in line or post a cover video.
I spent a lot of time, a lot of energy trying to be a better artist and I still [do]. I spend a lot of time focusing on my craft. If you're going to take your passion into something beyond just something for fun on the side, you got to spend a lot of time on it to be great, and then you've got to make smart decisions about who you collaborate with [and] where you live [to] put yourself in the right situations to meet the right people to catch those breaks.
I've always been a fan of movies well before I got involved in the industry. The magic that it brings and being able to, I guess, escape your troubles, escape whatever is going on in life and getting to live in this moment and in the story and live in the lives of these characters.
I went to church as a kid, but it was as much a social thing as anything going to the youth group with the other kids and whatnot. It wasn't until I got out of college that I got on my own religious trip and started finding other things out there as well as philosophies. I've kinda been on my own spiritual path since then.