At first, when you go to premieres and award shows, you're thinking, 'How the hell am I here? All these people I've never met are here, and it's so cool!' And then, as time goes on, it's a little bit like, 'Ah... it's more like work.'
It is tough, every time. The ensemble is great. I would always ask Andrew, "Is this how Hollywood is? Is this how every TV show and movie is?" And he was like, "No, dude. This is not. Do not get used to this. Be thankful that this is how your first gig is."
And I knew that, being an actor, you have to take the rough with the smooth and the highs with the lows. That's how it is.
No one really gets rich doing this. A couple people do, Black Sabbath does. We don't sell any records anymore.
When you decide you want to become a television writer, you naively assume it's going to be like the writers on the old 'Dick Van Dyke Show.' You'll write something and they'll just put it on TV. But what you quickly discover is that American network television is television by committee.
What's funny about the slacker thing, people project an image of what they think a musician is: young, slack, unemployed - like a really romantic idea of a poet, writer or musician - which isn't really true a lot of the time. I don't reckon you would know anything about me if I wasn't moderately hard-working.
A lot of people think, 'Oh, you made 'SNL.' You're set. You're good.' No. All there is gigs, and you go from one gig to another. And hopefully you get a good gig, and it lasts for a while, and you get good work and people remember it, and you have good memories of it.
It wasn't really my intention to make movies quickly - it's more to do with the reality of the Japanese film industry. That's been the only way for me to change my situation; to prove how little time you need to make a good film.
When you're in youth development, you have to develop players - win or come in second. But the job where I am and the reality of our industry is to win to be successful, and that is what I have to do. I have to be successful, and I want to be successful, so we'll do everything we can do to win.
When you find fame, or you get signed to a record label, it's not what you imagined - because you imagined they would have 100 percent trust or faith in you as an artist. Unfortunately, that's not really the case - it's what sells.
Fashion is an illusion. It's a multibillion-pound industry that has to appear frivolous. Designers work and work and work, all night sometimes.
I definitely caught the acting bug, but that lasted for about two seconds when I found my way to L.A. and found that my talents were better suited behind the cameras.
I liked when I was naive and I thought it was just about making good music.
My family had this dream where we would meet producers and songwriters, and it was not what we thought it would be.
When you go to Best Buy and see a DVD of your movie, you think it's amazing. But then there's a whole other world that comes with it. It's a very small percent that's difficult, stalker-like, or annoying. Most people are just so gracious and so nice. As cheesy as it sounds, that's the thing that really keeps you going.
We joke a lot about how, in Hollywood, the writer is one step below the doormat. That's not self-loathing. That's true!
You can do crap work in a big movie, and it does good things. You can do great work in a movie no one sees, it does nothing. That's the way it goes.
It takes a lot more than just knowing how to put an outfit together to succeed in the fashion industry, so more power to you if this is where you want to be; just don't expect it to be an extended trip to the mall.
I want to show people what it's really like to be in this industry. Because they only really see one side - the glamorous side - but there's so much more to it.
There will be hits and misses; you can't take it to heart. Of course, you feel bad when something doesn't do as well as you expected it to, but it's a part of being in films.
As an actor, you'll have ten parts in 2015 - eight of them will go to the other actors above you and two of them you might be close to, and you try to make them as good as you can.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't make money as an actor in the beginning. Your publicist might cost $5000 a month, so you're losing money.
You always have to remember in this business that the public doesn't care about us. It's very important to keep that in mind. If there is a public perception at all, they see the producer as a big old guy who smokes a cigar and has lots of money and lots of power. That's not what a producer is and, if it ever was what a producer was, it certainly hasn't been for a long time.
I don't think people realize how many scripts you write that go nowhere.
Being in this whole fashion industry, seeing it firsthand, I never realized just how much work goes into everything.
