I'm often asked where my nickname 'Kun' comes from. My parents says it was a Japanese cartoon I used to watch on television when I was very young, set in the Stone Age, where the main character was a boy called Kum Kum, the little caveman.
If you've seen 'Spirited Away', 'Spirited Away' is set in a very, very Japanese sensibility. And so, to Japanese audiences, when Sen would walk up, the main character, and look at this big building with a flag on it with Japanese writing on it, everyone in Japan would know what that is.
Ballycumber (ba-li-KUM-ber) n. One of the six half-read books lying somewhere in your bed.
My nickname at school was Caveman. When I tell people my name is Kayvan, some insist on going 'Caveman?'
I'll tell you what I really enjoy. We all go to the movies, we all watch television, we know what they're about, how they work. When the main character is a cop or a spy, it's very exciting, but I also very much enjoy when the main characters are nobodies - a trucker.
I wanted to write a very simple story about a boy, a wolf, a girl, a bear and a forest, so I thought I might set it in the past. I didn't realise that it went back to when I was 10: I used to love the Stone Age when I was a kid and wanted to live in it, and I got rid of my bed and slept on the floor, but I didn't remember it.
There's the caveman in us. The caveman in you says, "I want direct contact. I don't want a picture." The caveman in our body says once in a while, we have to go outside. We have to meet real people, talk to real people, and do real things.
We live in the golden age of character actors - in an age when actors who have done their time in character roles are frequently asked to carry dark movies and complicated television dramas.
At a very young age, when I was a baby, I used to mimic all of these movies, like 'Dreamgirls' and 'Ray,' the type of movies you wouldn't think a little kid would know. But my parents thought I was great.
When I was very young, even before I went to what you call elementary school, I used to read and watch Japanese comic books and anime all the time. These were the seeds of my future.
I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.
The dish that changed my life was tom yum kum. You start with a pot of water, add lemongrass, lime leaves, lime juice, coriander, mushrooms, and shrimp; ten minutes later, you have the most incredible, intense soup.
Besides being asked why I write about young characters, I am often asked how I write about young characters. How do I throw myself across the chasm of full adulthood to relive that period? I guess I don’t, really. Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.
Sometimes a nickname is used instead of the real name. But a nickname may offend either the one named or the parents who gave the name.
I would like to design a really cool watch. I've done a little bit of watches in the past, but I didn't have a lot of freedom because it was already sort of set in stone, everything around the watch. So I think a watch in the future would definitely be in the cards.
I'd describe 'Born to Kill' as a 'study in psychopathy', it's very much in the heads of our main protagonist, Sam, a young boy dealing with dark, twisted psychotic desires. It's also a coming-of-age story.