Remember, when YouTube was founded in the U.S., America's Funniest Home Videos had been around for a long time. In China, the history of TV as well as user-generated video is very, very short. So, we've actually had to do a lot of things to motivate that.
When I was 3, my mom sent in a video of me singing George Strait to 'America's Funniest Home Videos.'
I think America is a new country. It is a young culture. The spirit of the opening of the West is still with the Americans. It's a very practical and individual-based kind of philosophy that had worked in America for a long time, had been very successful. And the spirit is very much there.
America was my home for a very long time, and it's a fascinating, pioneering country that many people look to. In the recent past it hasn't been doing very well, but there's a great new hope now with the election of Obama. America took a very big leap there and proved that it still has the edge as far as being able to do things many other countries may find difficult.
Another thing is, people lose perspective. It is a cultural trait in America to think in terms of very short time periods. My advice is: learn history. Take responsibility for history. Recognise that sometimes things take a long time to change. If you look at your history in this country, you find that for most rights, people had to struggle. People in this era forget that and quite often think they are entitled, and are weary of struggling over any period of time
I did not grow up watching much TV and film. I had a very, very, very, very, very, very church family, and a lot of, like, secular stuff was not around my house.
You know, episodic TV directing is a very long and arduous job. You have very short schedules, short short shooting days, and you have to get lot of pages done.
I had to do this very aggressive, big score in a very short time, and knowing that in the beginning, middle, and end would be this very, very famous theme, but I still had to weave a score around it and make it work as a score was really challenging.
June [Hillary] had been doing all these things - the Himalayas and all the rest of it - so we had done things together for a long time, and, particularly as far as our Sherpas were concerned, we had a very sound, I think, philosophy. So that made it very easy for us to agree on what should be done.
Women's tennis has been around for a very long time - we're talking about the 1800s. But women's soccer hasn't had such a long history, so now they're right at the beginning of really trying to make things equal. We need to continue not only to advocate for women but to have men advocating for women.
It's very hard to just have a pure form like a Hulu or a YouTube to be successful in China because our view is, users come to a platform; they really don't care whether it is professional or whether it's a user-generated, or it's premium, you see. They want to come to a big database to be able to find the content they want.
Had 'Kaanta Laga' been a song sans video or if the video just had youngsters dancing in a discotheque, the audiences wouldn't have been interested in watching it. But it had a very unique theme.
Basically, the myth is that America has been founded on the free market; the government has done very little; it has thrived under free trade. But actually, if you look at the history, this is actually the country that has succeeded most with protectionist policies.
Having built-in video recording capabilities for a game that focuses on user-generated content might be a very good thing.
I was so poor for so long that I didn't use anything. I didn't drive cars, I didn't eat very much. So, I figured the world owed me a debt, so I've been eating very well and have had a very big car for a long time. But I still haven't caught up with my youth.
When you spend so much time away from home, travelling around doing things like this, talking about yourself too much, which is often very painful... So, to actually come home and just be amongst people who know you extremely well, who you can't pretend to be anything other than yourself in front of, is a relief really. It gives you a sense of who you are again. You just don't get any time at home... it's such an existence of feeling very unsettled and travelling around. It's great.
There's this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can't even fight against because they've been there so long that they've become part of the Western imagination of China.