A performance can have amazing visuals and special effects, but it has to tell a good story, even if that story isn't original.

Because my parents had given me tremendous respect, trust, and freedom as a child, I knew how to take responsibility for myself. If you're constantly being told "No, don't do that" or "We don't trust you," you can't develop that responsibility.

I use cinematic things in a theatrical way on stage, and in film I use theatrical techniques in a cinematic way.

People have become so literal because they're used to reality-based television.

When we were kids, you picked up a little paper and put it on a stick; and when you waved it back and forth, you understood the power of air underneath the wings. In that way, a child begins to understand abstraction, poetry, metaphor, symbolism. You play with the materials you have and use your imagination to make them into something else. That what's so sad about having everything on a little screen - it's not physical and dimensional, and that seems backward.

What I adore is the juxtaposition of high tech and low tech. It's sort of like I love the sacred and the profane. I love to put these extremes in the same hopper.

You program music with an image and then people are desensitized.