People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.

With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.

People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.

I understand the people-watching, but I've never done it where people have to race to three different shows, from here to there. I mean, the biggest zoo I ever faced was Comic Con, and Comic Con takes place in one big hangar.

People want somebody to be a daredevil, even if they're not going to be a daredevil themselves.

I remember reading about police arresting this filmmaker making this freaky movie and his name was John Waters. And I was like, wow, someone in Baltimore is doing something creative? I didn't know there were people running off and making eight-millimeter movies. Then I got to New York and realized, oh, there's a whole world of people who do these things. I was utterly bored being in the suburbs, but I didn't know why I was bored.

'Hairspray' was a movie turned Broadway musical turned Hollywood remake, and that is the 'Lion King' circle of life as we know it in Times Square, the creative loop that swings for the stars and sometimes crashes into the upper deck.