I feel pressure as a fan. I don't really feel pressure from the fans, if that makes sense. I worked on other movies, like the X-Men movies, that have big fan followings. And if you start to get lost in those voices, you will be completely lost. I feel the pressure of the 6-year-old me.
The first time I saw 'Sunset Boulevard' I was probably eight or nine years old, and it really struck me how it's so simply put and elegant, yet there's so much going on.
As a kid, I always loved Mel Brooks' stuff - 'The 2,000 Year Old Man' record was something my dad put me onto.
No film has captivated my imagination more than 'King Kong.' I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old.
It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.
'Dark Shadows' was the spark that lit the fire of my childhood imagination. It wasn't polished; it wasn't perfect. But it gave us characters with real personalities and complicated motivations.
I don't remember the very first animation I saw, but the one that stays deepest in my memory is definitely 'Astro Boy.'
I was raised playing music in coffeehouses and I feel that was the foundation for my career. I think it is important that we remember where we came from.
For inspiration you go to the archives, you go to things of the past, but you still need to be contemporary for today. You can never forget the time you're living in because the past is the past and it will never come back.
There was an enormous revival of pulp fiction that started in the '60s and continued into the '70s, which in large part gave rise to things like 'Star Wars' and 'Indiana Jones,' among others. But I developed an appetite for the original stuff at the time, and that appetite has never really abated.
I really like the look of old '70s and '80s Japanese comics, so I think that style is something I will continue to draw.
I have consumed so many Weisinger-era Superman comics that they ooze back out through my pores!
I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.
I think your teenage years define your musical roots forever. You're always looking for a theme for your high school years.
One of my mom's favorite movies growing up was 'Big' with Tom Hanks. I thought, 'Oh, OK, what if we do something like that but not like that. Something more modern, with a different perspective, and maybe with an all-black cast.'
I'm thrilled that Wonder Woman and that character endures because every actor wants a role that has some positive affect and causes people to smile or have good memories and to endure. It doesn't just go away, fade away. It's been 25 years that it's been off the air and so it still surprises me when younger people recognize me or know my work.
We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.
A songwriter's heart is pure when they have the desire to keep digging deeper into music. And invariably, when you dig deeper it always leads you into the past.
I had always wanted to name a daughter Hailey, after Halley's comet from Once in a Lifetime.
Technology is mechanical and contrary to the emotions that inform a person's life. The country music field has especially been hit hard by this. All my songs have been written by people who went out of fashion years ago. Just like da Vinci and Renoir and van Gogh. Nobody paints like that anymore. But it can't be wrong to try.
I remember the day I discovered James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. I don't know why it affected me so strongly, but I walked down to the corner store and bought every poster of them, and I did my whole room up. Overnight.
I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment... I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.
