I believe in making movies very inexpensively; I think that way too much money is spent on making movies. Enough movies are being made, but not enough experimental ones.
When Twitter made its way to my radar I looked at it as a curiosity, then started experimenting. I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and 'human.'
I'm sure I frustrate the trainers - in fact, I know I frustrate the trainers to no end. But I think there's a very fine line. I listen to their advice. I take their medical expertise very seriously. But then I also, the reason I am where I am, the reason I play the way I play, is because I push beyond normal.
On the way back from Mumbai to go meet with President Xi in China, I stopped in Singapore to meet with a guy named Lee Kuan Yew, who most foreign policy experts around the world say is the wisest man in the Orient.
It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.
If Romney would go ideological in explaining Obama, it would help. We gotta stop the, 'He's a nice guy' stuff. Nice guys don't do what Obama is doing. Nice guys don't say and do and act the way Obama is saying, doing, and acting.
I think I'm becoming a psychologist in explaining the Republican Party. It's the only way you can explain 'em. It's psychological.
The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
There's constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.
'Frampton Comes Alive!' is the album I'll always be remembered for. I'm very proud of the music that's on it. Why it exploded the way it did and continues to live on are things that can't fully be explained.
In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.
There's a very good reason for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations, the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will behave.
There are conservatives who say, 'Why would you show the country in a weak way?' And there are liberals who say I'm exploitative.
We look at Marvel, but we're not trying to emulate that in any way. In fact, we talked often about how distinctive what we're trying to do with 'Star Wars' is from Marvel. They've been extremely successful in exploiting the characters in that universe, and we have a place. We have the galaxy.
Exploitation films were famous for taking an issue an exploiting it because they could move much faster than a studio could. If there was any hot topic, they would run out and make a quick movie and make a buck on it, by changing it around and using it, in some way, to give some relevance.
Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time - our 'social graphs' - into money for others.
On every new project, I try to write in a different way and see if there's a new side of myself I haven't explored.
In 2010, there was a TED event called Mission Blue held aboard the Lindblad Explorer in the Galapagos as part of the fulfillment of Sylvia Earle's TED wish. I spoke about a new way of exploring the ocean, one that focuses on attracting animals instead of scaring them away.
One of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.
From earliest times, humans - explorers and thinkers - have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we've done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
