Yes, I met Carl Barat [from Dirty Pretty Things] yesterday when I was at the POPWORLD TV show. He smiled at me and watched 5 minutes of my performance. I don't think I've said anything that bad about anyone, though, to be honest.
I find the film world very romantic. I want to try to be in more movies. When you're on a TV show and you do the same thing for years and years, it can get a little bit boring.
The British have been more up for it than the Americans were, particularly with respect to nudity in the show. In Europe there are adverts that show the breasts, so people are less frightened of that aspect of the show. Americans can withstand incredible violence on TV shows - which, as I come from England and Canada, I find difficult to stomach - but they are more puritanical when it comes to nudity on screen.
I never skimp on TV. I watch an embarrassing amount of TV shows. I don't even know how I do it.
I'm not sitting around thinking of ideas for TV shows.
I like doing both comedy and drama. I'm not really feeling more drawn to one over the other. I also like dramedies. I like movies and TV shows that are mixtures of the two.
What they say about TV shows is true. You're really a family. You laugh, you fight, you get close, you know? Movies are shorter. They're over quicker. You don't form the same bonds.
The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.
All my TV shows are done live in front of audiences, and all the material I take on the road and travel with them test them for hundreds and hundreds of shows before I shoot them for TV.
The only two TV shows I saw do that, where they don't warm them up and you can really bomb, was Saturday Night Live - and that's why it gets a lot of heat, too. Obviously it gets criticism fairly, too. But a lot of it is because Lorne [Michaels] lets the audience decide and doesn't force them to laugh.
There are certain economics involved in making a network TV show that you want to amortize the costs of that, so the more episodes you make, the cheaper they all are individually.
If you're watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you're not watching it in a theatre? If you watch a TV show on your iPad, is it no longer a TV show? The device and the length are irrelevant; the labels are useless, except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers, who use these labels to conduct business deals.
And so as a director, as a leader, and myself as a director and a leader, I kind of try to make sure that we hold onto the vision and kind of corral it, but by the time you finish whatever the project is, a TV show, a series, a movie, a stage show, it should be a product of what all those people can do, and therefore, it can never be what you imagined it would be in the beginning.
One of the tricky things about running a TV show is that you just never know how good the guest stars you cast on a weekly basis, how good they're going to be in the episode. Sometimes they surprise you in good ways and sometimes they surprise you in disappointing ways.
My day job is making TV shows.
Anytime you test for a TV show, you have that bit of squeamishness entering into it because they lock you in for a number years.
Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
Of course, on a job, you have a shared common interest in the fact that you're there making a movie or making a TV show, and that creates unification within a group. There has to be something more than just the work for that to continue on, for that friendship to continue on.
Well, I don't ever get excited. I haven't been excited since I got a Chopper bicycle when I was about 12. Once you get older you realise there's always a catch to everything. So when I get, say, a commission to make a TV show, the catch is that you have to deliver something and then the sense of responsibility overwhelms the joy of the occasion.
I think my biggest problem was, as a celebrity on a TV show, you get an inflated ego and you think you're the center of the universe.