My best ideas almost always come from winding up in unexpected places and stumbling across things I never could have imagined in advance.
I can't stand things that are poorly made or shoddily conceived. I feel like I'm being insulted when something is poorly designed, poorly made. It's like whoever made that thing didn't respect the rest of us enough to do it well.
If you have a lot of fans, you have a powerful soapbox, but you still have to have something to say when you're on that soapbox if you want to make a real difference.
I'm very active in pushing for net neutrality and an open Internet. There are countless other causes I support personally and privately, but I try to keep my public activism fairly focused.
What puts me in a vulnerable state? Beauty, wonder, surprise, mystery. Stuff like that.
If some dude I'd never heard of managed to broadcast a platitude like that to the whole globe, I'd probably just feel like I was being spammed.
A lot of things get made this way: someone imagines what they want to make, then very carefully plans every step of the process, then sets about making it. That's usually the efficient, reasonable way to get something done, but it limits you to ideas you can think of in advance.
For me, it works best to plan just enough to come up with a good direction to head out in. Then I start down the path as soon as I can, without a very clear idea of what exactly I'm going to end up with. I try to leave a lot of time for flexibility and play and changing direction.
There's no hope of people paying attention to your music video if you don't let others use it.
I'm passionate about music, food, books, film, blah, blah. The same things everyone is passionate about, no? Love, sex, connection. Peace. Not f - - g up our planet.
I think that artists and musicians can do as much harm as good for causes if they tie their names to lots of things, especially if they aren't really doing much to meaningfully push their causes forward.
I can't imagine everyone on the planet would want to hear something from me. If I thought they'd listen, I'd probably ask them to try to be nicer to each other, to try to be less scared of their differences.
I can have fairly crippling self-criticism. It doesn't really put me in a vulnerable state, I just get glum and intolerable, but it certainly is a vulnerability.
David Foster Wallace is a big idol of mine. His writing is so clear that for years I'd read him and think, My God, he is actually writing the way I think. He's describing the thoughts in my head. And then I realized, No, wait. He's just such a good writer, so transparent and articulate, that when he describes his thoughts, I think they're my own.
Actually, here is something I'm passionate about that, looking around me, seems like the world at large must not care about as much as I do: craft.
What we did is we went on those parabolic flights, which people like to call the vomit comet. Basically, the plane throws you up into the air and catches you. And for about 30 seconds, you feel like there's no gravity. So what we did was we did a series of eight of those in a row. And every time we landed, we stayed perfectly still for the five minutes in between while the plane is setting up so that we could just continue the routine where we had left off. So the final video you see is all one take. And we seem to be weightless the entire time.
It's the good old paradox of democracy. We are individually pretty small drops in the bucket, but collectively we are all powerful.
I like shooting things in single takes. You have to rely on the idea itself to carry the full weight; you're always watching the idea, not the filmmaking.
I will say that the lead cosmonaut trainer - I mean, we were working with professional cosmonaut trainers outside of Moscow. And the lead one, at the end of the project, announced to the entire group that he wanted Trish [Sie] to be on his team forevermore.
Everyone loves the idea of internet fast enough that HD movies download in seconds, but if only the telecoms or their partners get to use the high speeds, it's not the internet: It's glorified cable.
