I want viewers want to talk about The Conquest. I want the dialogue to start after the movie. The cinema is there to leave a trace. I hope my film leaves a trace and that it will open a door for French cinema and that tomorrow other directors will make political movies. The job of a filmmaker today is to talk about the world surrounding him and, through his movies, to both entertain and raise questions about modern society.
I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone ever asks about is the persecution. It may well be that's the last thing in the world they want to talk about. There were many years in which every journalist in the world wanted to talk to me, but nobody wanted to talk to me about my work. That felt deeply frustrating because I felt there was an attempt to stifle me as an artist. The best revenge I could have was to write.
On the one hand, young theatre directors were coming to television theatre, because they wanted to get closer to the cinema, despite having studied and worked for the theatre.
Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.
If you just had an inspiration at night or with a girl or whatever and you want to talk about it, you don't necessarily want to share it with everybody . . . That's the first thing that made me want to go solo; I wanted to talk about my own things, I wanted to try to be creative [in] my own way.
Before I worked on film, I studied the theatre, and I expected that I would spend my whole career in theatre. Gradually, I started writing for the cinema. However, I feel grateful towards the theatre. I love working with spectators, and I love this experience with the theatre, and I like theatre culture.
When I was really young, I was obsessed with Bollywood. Then I got exposed to world cinema, and I wanted to be a part of it. Then I was exposed to theatre, and I only wanted to do theatre.
I went to theatre school for four years and just wanted to do theatre. I had no ambition to be on TV or to be on camera. I just wanted to go to New York or London and be on stage... I did a lot of theatre in Montreal, got involved in TV in Toronto and then moved to L.A. I hope that film and TV will take me back to theatre.
I need theatre for my equilibrium, because in theatre the actors don't care so much about image, about celebrity - you are more independent. There is not the narcissism, maybe, that you find in cinema.
Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
I was being trained because I wanted to be a preacher like my father. I wanted to talk about Moses; I wanted to talk about God... I wanted to talk about the apostles, the disciples and all that.
I hired a publicist once I got cast in 'Passing Strange,' and one of the first conversations we had was about how I wanted to handle talking about my sexuality. I said, 'It's never been an issue for me. I want to talk about my work, but if something about myself relates to my work, of course I'll talk about it.'
If you confine it, you're confining a whole thing. If you make it spontaneous, so that anything can happen, like we don't want to confine or restrict anything. What we can do, whatever we can let happen, you just let it happen.
The theatre at my school was awesome. It was a 1,400-seat auditorium, so, being in that auditorium at 17, and having, like, 1,400 people cheer for you was, like, one of the most amazing feelings that I've ever felt, energy-wise. It just felt right.
I'm just gonna talk about being Nigerian-American. I'm gonna talk about being single. I'm gonna talk about what happened to me on the train today. I'm gonna talk about so many other things that, as a comic, you're able to talk about because you see the world in sarcasm.
I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can't let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn't even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.