Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy.
The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business. It just doesn't work and you're going to hit a brick wall at some point.
The business is so international now; you'll be working on an American film, and you'll start chatting to someone, and it's like: 'Oh, you're English, too.'
Standing as I do, with my hand upon this staff, and under the folds of the American flag, I ask you to stand by me so long as I stand by it.
Before the Berlin Wall came down, we played behind the Iron Curtain and sang, 'Born in the U.S.A.,' and I thought, 'We're all going to die. The man is going to get us all killed.' But then you saw all these kids with the American flag and German flags together and singing the song, and it was, wow, like 'We Shall Overcome.'
I don't think you will meet anyone in Israel who will ever burn the American flag.
When I see the American flag, I go, 'Oh my God, you're insulting me.'
You're going to see a rise of the white male voter who feels like they're not secure, their country has been taken away. They cherish the American flag. They have fought for the American flag. They have fought for the American idea and the ideal.
Rugby is just a ball. I would be much more versed to coach American football, but you need 22 players and all of the equipment. With rugby, all you need is some green grass, a ball, and a bunch of kids who want to run into each other really hard, which they enjoy.
Rugby is a different game. There is an interruption every two minutes also in American football. Our soccer is a moving game: play, play, play, move, move - you don't interrupt.
I don't think anything can prepare you for the 'Strictly' experience. It really is insane. I mean, I played football, rugby, American football. I go to the gym. I like to think I'd be quite fit, and I don't have much fat on me to lose, and yet I still lost a stone and half and three inches off my waist.
American leagues - baseball, ice hockey, American football and basketball - you are the best. But in a global sport like soccer, you're not.
I think that American presidents, that position in itself, as well as American foreign policy, it has terrorism in it. CIA agents going to overthrow certain governments - they're using terrorist tactics. They're not going in there like, 'Hey, you wanna have some cake?'
Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States.
American government is like a train on a track. You have the people on the left shouting; you have the people on the right. But the train's on track. They just keep ploughing ahead.
The economical policies that are instigated really makes you think that the American government is a bunch of evil bastards. So just because you're black, you're still representing that government, and when Obama came into office he enacted the same policies that we would critique other presidents for.
Apple and Google want to create encryption for which they could not provide you the key. Their business model will not survive if the American government has a special relationship with them that requires them to surrender this kind of information.
When you go back and look at American history, it's not terribly different from Canadian history. If you weren't self-reliant on the prairie, you wouldn't survive.
It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story.
When I heard 'Jesus, Take the Wheel,' I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you're a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.
