I am an American. I love my country and have great hopes for it. It is for this reason that I speak candidly and sometimes critically about it. I have benefited greatly from the freedom that exists in my country and for this I am eternally grateful.

One thing that's been a great, uplifting experience through all this is, since the first "Pirates" [movie], the people who've gone to see the films, the audience members. You meet people on the street - whether they're 5, 25, 65 or 85 - they've all had the same experience, and they've all enjoyed it. So that's what keeps me moving forward in this crazy process.

I'm not 'Blockbuster Boy.' I never wanted to be. I wasn't looking for that.

We would just go out and line up a bunch of cans and shoot with rifles, handguns and at times, submachine guns... When I was a kid it was a controlled atmosphere, we weren't shooting at humans... we were shooting at cans and bottles mostly. I will most certainly take my kids out for target practice.

Barrie and the wonderful characters he created, Lewis Carroll, even French literature, like Baudelaire or over in the States, Poe, you open those books, you open The Flowers of Evil and begin to read. If it were written today, you'd be absolutely stupefied by the work. It's this incredible period where the work is timeless, ageless. So yeah, I just love all those guys. It's my deep passion in those great 19th century writers.

There may be something in the fact that when I was a little kid I'd been told growing up that we had some degree of native American blood in us, I always found that a point of pride. So, when it came to cowboys and Indians I most certainly did not want to be John Wayne. I wanted to be one of the Indians.

Kids accept a lot more, and they buy it, because they're free.