When I started acting in the film industry when I was 16 years old, in 1980, I was going to all the revival theaters in Los Angeles. They were playing mostly films from the '60s and '70s, some from the early '20s and '30s, before that Hays commission. Those films did question things a lot, and there definitely was a switch in 1934. You can see very distinctly in 1934, it's harder to understand what the real culture was. Films made before 1934, you can really kind of see the racism, sexism, drug use, etc. that was going on at that time. And then it was all stopped.

I started out as an actor but now I act to fund my own productions. I've managed to separate my mindset.

I like getting older. When you're in your twenties you're really forging for your future. Things take shape later on.

For me, listening to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in particular, there's an emotional aspect - very different kinds of emotional aspects from those two composers, nonetheless, very strong emotional aspects from both of those composers.

My interest in music tends toward being orchestral music. And the repertoire of music that exists is, to me, far more emotive than what is standardly used in movie scores. That isn't always. I think there've been some excellent movie scores by excellent directors. But for the most part, watching a film, one of today's movies, I think that the emotional undertone of movie scores is pretty poor.

Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite. The only true cinema verite would be what Andy Warhol did with his film about the Empire State Building - eight hours or so from one angle, and even then it's not really cinema verite, because you aren't actually there.

The books I made, most of those books were made in the '80s or early '90s. I was reacting emotionally at that time; it wasn't an intellectual thing. I didn't make those things for public presentation; those were for my friends. So I wasn't doing this to be an advocate for what I'm talking about right about now. But I'm realizing I was working properly as an artist, or whatever you want to call it, as somebody that naturally was inquisitive.