Emerging Talent Quotes

Even primitive areas can produce a superstar.

I think '205 Live' is the ultimate underdog story. This isn't a knock on any other brands; you have your stars on 'Raw,' you have your stars on 'SmackDown Live,' and I almost feel like NXT already has this amazing face to continue building stars, but '205 Live,' that is not the case. There is no foundation. We are not capitalizing off of stars.

I was 19 when I recorded my first album, and I've been exposed to many things during these last few years; all the baby fat is gone.

I had never released any music until 'Bruises' came out when I was 20.

I go a lot to see young people downtown in little theaters. It's great. If you start somebody's career, it's so exciting.

The Beatles were raw musically, but I think they really had something.

Youth. The fact that, in the mid-'90s, guys like Lee Fields gave me and all these young people the chance to do backup. I was in my 30s, but some of those guys were still teenagers. Others were 22 and 23 - babies, all of them.

As with every young player these days, Ronaldo is 18.

If I had a script that I was ready to shoot tomorrow, I'd work on it every day until we got into production as soon as possible, but I don't have that script yet, so I'm trying to find and support writers, really young writers and hopefully come across a story that I wanna tell one day.

There's a lot of good rappers in England at the moment. There's a lot of good dance acts. A lot of good, young guitar acts. I think a lot of groups came from that dole culture of the late 80's/early 90's - it's not as easy now. I think there's a dearth of working class bands.

We are going back to our roots by cultivating new unsigned talent who otherwise might go unnoticed.

But the great thing about shows now is since we've been doing (Comedy Death Ray), they have lightened up on their booking policies a bit more and are booking somebody who isn't famous and who hasn't been around ten years. It's great to see people who've done our show - the first big show they've ever done - now they can play around town.

I think there's an enormous lot of talent around, and somewhere amongst these I'm sure that something will emerge, given time.

The biggest thing I'm seeing - and I have to be careful what I say here - is that people are tired of the old guard and the familiar brands. They're looking for more individuality and creativity, and that's coming out of this whole new wave of younger brands: Thom Browne, Michael Bastian, Robert Geller, myself.

It's one of the old show business axioms. No matter how successful you've been, there's always a younger and sexier seal coming along.

I like working with new artists.

When I made my first film, I didn't think of it as directing, so it wasn't like I set out to become a director.

I chose to deal with the underdogs on '1 Train.' I could've got the biggest superstars in the rap game, but why do that when you can let the young boys shine?

There's definitely a lot of undiscovered talent in Africa. If I'm one of them and there's a few other guys in the league, that means that there must be some that are hidden.

I'm really happy that I got to work with such fresh talent. In a day when record companies are not particularly good at encouraging young, talented songwriters to come forward and get exposure, I think it's important to give tomorrow's songwriters the opportunity.

The excitement for me lies not so much in interviewing the hard-to-get famous person, but the person whom you are about to discover. You know, like maybe the character actors who are just coming into their own and you're realizing how great they are.

If you look at who emerged on the horizon 12 to 18 months after ECW stopped running shows, I think it's very reasonable to believe that we would have picked up CM Punk and several of the other young stars that emerged in the independent scene in the early part of that decade. Punk obviously is the one that I would hope I would have noticed.

Ultimately, the film industry has always pushed out its biggies, and I don't have a problem with that. I just wish that we'd spend more time nurturing the smaller ones.

It takes time, but I have a promising team of younger Ministers, and I am quite sure from amongst them, one leader will emerge.

Eric McCormack is directing talent waiting to happen.