Over the years, I would go to my agents, my manager, and I would say, 'Hey, there's this amazing true story about this gay English mathematician who committed suicide in the 1950s.' And they would be like, 'Please don't ever write that script. That is an unmakeable film.'
We're not uncomfortable with it, and we've already been through enough of the music business where I'm not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way - we're already past saving, you know what I mean? It's too late for us.
My partner, Jeff Ullrich, and I always thought Earwolf was going to be big. There were a couple of studies before we launched saying podcasts were going to really grow. But I remember so many conversations at the beginning where people would say, 'How are you going to make money with this?'
The implication was that if you had any skepticism whatsoever, you were anti-science. I think there's a difference between having skepticism about science and having skepticism about the pharmaceutical industry.
I know that there are going to be people that don't like my music, but I think in the industry itself it is always that, 'Oh. you're from the 'X Factor.' There have been certain radio stations that will not play your song because you are from the 'X Factor,' yet they'll play another song from an artist from another TV show.
Industry people do know when a PR movement plays out. The issue is that it is an insult to our intelligence when those who are doing the PR thing presume that we are not wiser.
I don't think that Dreamworks would have signed me expecting to really mess around with whatever it is I do.
I've never really had a problem with the imagination level of an audience. They're always smarter and savvier than any studio exec will give them credit for.
Moving to London was a culture shock, but in a really good way. I'm more aware now, and I'm less trusting of people in the music industry.
At the end of the day, when people say, 'Oh, she's an industry plant,' I'm like, 'No, I just have representation, like every single other artist you listen to.' I'm not the first person to get a manager.
When I'm gigging, there's an uneasy shift when I pull a puppet out. People look at me aghast and I feel I have about 20 seconds to win them over. You even get the prejudice among other people in your own profession.
When I decided to work with Krishna Vamsi, people around me were apprehensive about my decision. They warned me that I shouldn't work with an unsuccessful director.
I performed it all the way through for people. People would say, "We love you, we want to sign you," and then there'd always be one person who'd say, "He's just a producer."
The amazing thing is that the more money it takes for a movie to get made, the more you feel like everybody wants you to fail.
I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.
The only challenge I faced in the beginning was that no one believed I could seriously see a film through.
I remember people telling me that at 5 1/2 minutes long, 'Lightning Crashes' would never be a hit song.
A lot of people relate my success now with The Voice, and it has nothing to do with that. I've definitely worked my ass off for a year afterwards trying to get that off of my forehead. If anything, it's actually harder to get labels to look at you when you come off a show like that, and it's harder for people to look at you like a real artist.
When I was a freelancer, I thought this journalism thing was a racket, and now that I'm where I am now, I know it's a racket.
Trust is hard to get from actors, and for me to give to actors.
I have friends who have a CD mastering plant in Hollywood and they are very sceptical about European record labels' understanding of digital technology.
If I went in to pitch this show to a network, I would be laughed out of the room.
I hate record labels. They think they know everything. I want to hear them try to sing it.
We'd go to studios with ideas to do movie musicals and they'd literally kick us out. They said, 'Audiences aren't interested in movie musicals. You're wasting our time.'
The casting directors that were aware of 'The Real World' looked at me as a joke. It was so hard to get away from that.
