I used to watch 'Coming to America' every day after school. I have full-on long-running inside jokes with friends and family about different scenes in that movie alone. Also, my brother and I loved 'The Golden Child,' so, yeah: I was a huge fan of Eddie Murphy growing up.
I'd been brought up on... American TV: 'Lou Grant,' 'Starsky & Hutch;' 'Gilligan's Island.'
Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient texts and pictures were sacred - Potter, Milne and the rest. Even concerned parents who knew Freud and Jung never saw the contradictions in feeding us on them.
'E.T.' and 'Star Wars' were cult movies then and opened up a brand new world of adventure and mystery. But as much as I would have loved to be friends with E.T., I realized that following in the footsteps of Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan was more realistic.
I love the Beatles. I haven't named any kids after them but I still really love them. They were the first group that I was ever properly aware of. In my early teens I would sometimes stay in and listen to the radio all day in the hope that I would catch a song by them that I'd never heard before and be able to tape it on my radio-cassette player.
My mom is from Venezuela, and my dad is German and Japanese, and we lived in Brazil when I was a kid for a couple of years, and then I grew up on Long Island. I think all the traveling and all the nationalities put that stuff in my head. I was just around it a lot.
I was born in 1950, so there were tons of Westerns on TV by the time I was 6, 7, 8 years old. In terms of television, 'Maverick' and 'Have Gun - Will Travel.' But filmically, classics like 'High Noon' and 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' - that's one of my favorite films.
I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.
As a child of West Texas, I identify with Hispanic culture every bit as much as I do North American culture.
My first encounter with science fiction was reading the work of H.G. Wells when I was nine or ten, and I don't believe 'The War of the Worlds' or 'The Time Machine' have ever been bettered. Plus, I have always had a liking for Victorian and Edwardian clothes and contraptions, which tends to color the worlds I dream up.
I grew up partially in Switzerland but mostly in Australia. I lived in Kakadu for a short time - it's an Aboriginal community. My best friend growing up was Aboriginal. She taught me so much.
When I was younger, I would listen to Lauryn Hill, Destiny's Child, Justin Timberlake, Aaliyah: lots of '90s R&B.
In grade one and two, I was definitely into heavy metal and Satanic rock music, bands that had attributes that were quote-unquote 'Satanic,' even things like the Rolling Stones with 'Their Satanic Majesties Request' and 'Sympathy for the Devil,' but also like Motley Crue and Kiss and Alice Cooper.
When I was little I definitely listened to a lot of DMX and 50 Cent. Those were probably the two main rappers I was listening to when I was young, but my favorite rapper has always been Lil Wayne.
I didn't watch a lot of TV growing up; I watched more films.
As a kid, I saw a lot of scary movies, but they were mixed with comedy, like 'Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.'
I've had enormous luck and enormous pleasure in working in such forms as movies and plays that I loved when I was a kid and I just - because I could always write dialogue, because I always had a sense of how people spoke. And because I had a strong narrative sense; growing up and loving stories, loving novels, I just seem to know how to tell a story and I read a lot, I went to a lot of movies, I went to a lot of plays, and it rubbed off on me. And that's all. It just rubbed off on me.
Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross and the Jackson 5, that's what I grew up on.
I'd been collecting eccentric moves since I was a kid and didn't even know that the dance step I improvised in 'Be Back Soon' was called a 'pas de basque.'
I started out as a Cold Warrior, even my last years in grade school.
I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard verses and prayers every day. I liked the gorier Bible stories. I did have a book of Chinese fairy tales. All the people except the elders looked like Italians. But we were not a family that had fiction books.
I think people love nature after they experience it. I know I experienced it as a young man - I took a lot of hikes, I was involved in scouting.
I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.
As far as female vocalists, I love Heart, Joan Jett, Courtney Love, Laura Branigan, Linda Ronstadt, Barbra Streisand - or going back to when I was a child, Aileen Quinn, the original Annie.
I paid attention to the music industry and watching a lot of stuff on TV, behind-the-scenes stuff on old DVDs, and paying attention to interviews from artists and rappers and just really watching a lot of stuff as a kid.
