I always felt that, as an actor, I should play a variety of roles rather than just sticking to one kind & getting typecast.
I've been singing one kind of genre for a long time but have always tried to push to new auras about picking new songs or the same kind of genre but trying to sing it differently, treating it differently.
This song 'All Aboard,' that tune allowed me to expand and kind of offer my audience something totally different because it's not bachata - I'm singing English, and that was really fun.
I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all.
I was always creatively stubborn, adverse to editing by others, and wanted to use the kind of Ukrainian we spoke among ourselves rather than the more artificial prescribed literary Ukrainian. The problem was the greatest in prose, where editors would change my language because "it sounded better this way." My poetry they left alone probably out of deference to that hallowed genre.
I was always an album guy, not a greatest hits kind of guy, not so much a radio guy. I'm not saying one is better than the other but... It was like reading a novel but shorter than that. You go into a world for an hour and you absorb yourself into it rather than just passively listening and flipping through this and that.
I was raised to be in service to something larger than myself. A lot of actors concentrate on what they will get out of the profession, rather than what they can offer it. The way I see it, if you come with something to offer, you can offer it forever.
Music's always been a big part of my life, but it kind of all happened in one big ball of storytelling rather than splitting acting and singing apart.
Oh, things always get better. Tomorrow will always be better. Just think about it . . . is there any time in history in which you'd rather live than now?
The action genre is kind of designed for a young male audience. But we found on 'The Matrix' that we hit the Valhalla of movie making, which is the four quadrant audience - the young male audience, the older male audience, the young female audience and the older female audience.
I did not fix any genre for 'AK.' We just write a story and audience will put it in a genre as they perceive it.
I like being able to do anything. I think that's healthy, doing anything and everything, rather than just getting completely obsessed with one particular genre or particular kind of work.
If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.
I'd rather lose the small part of the audience that is going to be insulted because a documentary shouldn't have music than the big part of the audience that kind of gives itself over to the scene.
On one level, of course, the notion of judging films or books or music against each other is completely ridiculous. Who's to say '12 Years A Slave' is a better film than 'The Wolf of Wall Street'? Or that one album in a certain genre is better than another in a completely different genre?
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.