Jesus, music has always been my first love. I use music in my work because it's the fastest way to an emotional place. You hear a song, and that memory comes right back-- you're there... Making music is immediate, and it's all about you. If you're playing guitar, the feeling comes through-- the way you bend the note, the intensity with which you hit the strings. With making films, although it's real emotion, it's false emotion. You're lying.

There were so many great teachers that had so much to offer. The idea of being rigid, why would you do that? People have their things, but why be rigid with any education when you can take things from here and take things from there?

My kids, they're my energy, my soul, and my nicest friend.

The only gossip I'm interested in is things from the Weekly World News - 'Woman's bra bursts, 11 injured'. That kind of thing.

When you take on the idea of playing someone like Jimmy Bulger, it's a radically different process because you're going into make-up. The only way you can do it is to come out of make-up looking like the guy. If you don't look like the guy, it's going to bug you, all day.

Alice and I, we'd met before, but we were able to kind of sit and chat on the set of Dark Shadows, and talk about maybe writing some songs together. We started doing that, and then one thing led to another and it became this Vampire project - because he was telling stories about all those days, which were fascinating.

It's funny what [producer Richard Zanuck said about even though you can't quite place when the book or the story came into your life, and I do vaguely remember roughly five years old reading versions of Alice in Wonderland, but the thing is the characters. You always know the characters. Everyone knows the characters and they're very well-defined characters, which I always thought was fascinating. Most people who haven't read the book definitely know the characters and reference them.