I've never been anywhere in my life like it and I only really noticed it when I returned to Los Angeles and then Berlin. Everybody is much better off in these places, there is not poverty like in Cuba, but everybody complains about things.
I don't live in Los Angeles. I work in Los Angeles, and even that - I audition in Los Angeles; I very rarely film in Los Angeles. I don't hang out with producers on my off-hours, so I don't even know what that world is like.
I'm always looking for ways to connect myself with American people and that American feeling. I'm trying to pick up on the feeling of places, like the Los Angeles feeling or the New York feeling... Los Angeles is much better for me that way.
Since I have spent many years of my life living in Los Angeles, and since I'm also in the music business, I know that much more is talked about in Los Angeles than ever really occurs.
If you're eight and you live in Los Angeles and everybody has toys and you go to a country that has a Marxist dictatorship and there are no toy stores and nobody speaks English and it's blazing hot every day and they only have fish, which you don't like, then you tend not to appreciate the cultural lessons you're learning.
I was a very good tennis player in Ottawa, Canada - nationally ranked when I was, like, 13. Then I moved to Los Angeles when I was 15, and everyone in L.A. just killed me. I was pretty great in Canada. Not so much in Los Angeles.
On thinking about Hell, I gather
My brother Shelley found it was a place
Much like the city of London. I
Who live in Los Angeles and not in London
Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be
Still more like Los Angeles.
I don't want to be one of those people that complains about the rumours. I never like it when a celebrity goes on Twitter and says, "This isn't true!" It is what it is, I tend not to do that. The only time it gets really annoying is that if you get into a relationship and you get into a place where you really like someone and then things are being written in the papers that affect them and how they see you. Then it can get annoying.
I didn't want everybody to be pretty. I didn't want everybody to be thing. I didn't want everybody to be a size 4. I wanted it to be like the world. I think that we got there, and that was really special. I wanted texture and grit to everything. And then, you have an actress like Sarah Gadon, where you could rub dirt on her face and she'd look like she stepped off of a Vogue cover, and that's fine.
There are two places that are hard to write about. A place like Britain, England in particular, which has been written about by everybody, and then the place that's never been written about.
Oh, well, in Los Angeles everybody is an actor, or a producer, or a writer, or a director, or an agent, or... So everybody understands the hours.
One of my problems with a lot of things I watch is that everybody's too pretty, and it takes me out of the film because I'm thinking that all these people look like I've seen them in a cafe in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles has always been overlooked as far as jazz, and just high-level music in general. But, like, my dad's a musician, so I've grown up around so many brilliant musicians that nobody outside Los Angeles knows about.
I think private school is much better at customer service and making the parents feel better, especially in Los Angeles. It's almost like a spa for the parents where you drop your kids off, where they give you a beautifully baked thing and let the parents write their own newsletter about global warming.
But 'Cuban Linx' was a project that really needed to come, and I really wanted to get it off my chest because I know that the fans were really skeptical about it, like 'is this really gonna be what it's supposed to be?' So once everybody caught it for what it was and everybody was happy, that's mission accomplished for me.
I love Los Angeles, and I've secretly always wanted to do a song about Los Angeles, but it's a hard thing to pull off.
We've got the prettiest girls in the world here in Los Angeles and there's a great music scene. And I learned what I learned about cinema here in Los Angeles so it's always been really important to me as a city to live in and I love making movies about it.