Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was invited to do an all-female improv festival in Portland called All Jane, No Dick. The person running it asked me if I had a female improv team, and I just said yes and then figured out who I would want to bring with me. We had such a fun show together that we decided that we should keep doing it.
I quite like that people tend not to know my name. I remember being at the Cannes film festival for 'All or Nothing.' I looked very different in the film - I had a little greasy bob and no makeup. I went to a dinner after the screening, and everyone completely ignored me. I got a real buzz out of that.
On returning to India I took up a short assignment as assistant to the secretary of jury at the International Film Festival, and Satyajit Ray was the chairman. He was on the lookout for an assistant, and that's how I went to Kolkata. I learnt a lot - the discipline, conceptualization, planning your shots.
If you get to bring a little movie on the festival circuit, it's a nice experience because you get to see it with an audience. People who go to festivals to watch films are usually a little more eager to enjoy them. It's exciting because it's like you're going to the film's opening night at every festival.
I feel best in a ragged pair of red Honda Motorcycle pants. I have taken them to Machu Picchu, to the Knob Creek Machine Gun festival, and backstage to Cirque du Soleil - just the right touch to make you untouchable. No one quite dares to throw you out, because perhaps you are a world class motocross racer.
It took Cianfrance 12 years to bring 'Blue Valentine' to the screen after he first conceived it. He found Gosling and Williams early on, and they hung in there with him. The film finally premiered at Sundance 2010, then screened at Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival before landing in theaters in December.
I brought Muhammad Ali to North Korea in 1995. I tried that once. It didn't work out quite that well for me as it did for Dennis Rodman, but I brought Muhammad Ali to Pyongyang, North Korea, as part of a big wrestling event called the World Peace Festival. It was a two-day event that drew over 350,000 people.
Because I produce a comedy festival and because I write and all of that stuff, I've seen the relationship that actors can create, in a bad way sometimes, with the rest of the people they work with. I just want to be a good representation of, 'Actors are great! They're not what some people might think they are.'
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written into God's Book of Life.
Tribeca Film Festival Doha will promote Middle Eastern themes and filmmakers, but not exclusively. Approximately 40 films will be presented at the new Museum of Islamic Art and in cinemas across Doha. Innovative work by established filmmakers will be shown alongside the debuts of newly discovered directing talents.
You just have to have a song that you're desperate to play along to, and for me it was 'Turn' by the Scottish band Travis. I went to see them headline the Scottish T in the Park Festival, so after that festival, I went home and taught myself all of the Travis back catalog with an old guitar and a little chord book.
Every year in Edinburgh, I end up waiting behind the curtain about to go on stage, and I have a moment of thinking, 'No one's told me what to do with this show. I've done exactly what I wanted. This is the biggest arts festival in the world, and all these people have shown up. Aren't I lucky?' It really is amazing.
In December of 2001, after September 11th, my wife, Jane Rosenthal, and Robert DeNiro asked me if I would help them create the Tribeca Film Festival. The idea was to revitalize lower Manhattan. We would show films on piers, in high schools. It was all about the community. We wanted it to be accessible to everybody.
I've always wanted to be a DJ so I could play the music I love for other people. That feeling hasn't changed, but my sets are always evolving. In terms of tailoring to a specific crowd, certainly I do play differently depending on the situation. It's a different feel, for example, in a small club versus a festival.
I used to do a lot of serious theatre during my school and college days. Comedy was only reserved for youth festival and inter-college competitions. Then once 'The Great Indian Laughter Challenge' was launched, a regional channel in Punjab started a program based on that. I participated in it and emerged as the winner.
My first time on TV doing stand-up, I actually did this show in Holland called 'The Comedy Factory' hosted by Jorgen Raymann. It was in 2006 in Holland. It was amazing. I had only been doing stand-up for four years, and I booked that gig through the Just For Laughs Montreal festival, and they flew me out and put me up.
I've spent a lot of very happy times in Edinburgh as a result of playing virtually every festival since 1996. It's also a beautiful city in its own right, is walkable, within sight of the sea and mountains - and was too far north for the Luftwaffe to have done any damage, hence the spectacularly beautiful architecture.
When I was a kid, I was roaming through Glastonbury Festival at eight years old, on my own. I say 'on my own', but I was probably with my oldest sister Sarah, and she would have been 13 or 14 at the time, so she'd have been walking us around. But I got to go places and meet people, and was trusted a lot, without a doubt.
The Southbank Centre Unlimited Festival was a distinct moment in time, an amazing counterpoint to the London 2012 Paralympics. There is no question that a major shift in perspective is taking place, that the world is waking up and greeting - as if for the first time - the extraordinary community of people with disability.
I didn't have the money to put myself through drama school, so I thought - naively - that if I wrote a play and put it on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, agents would see me and that would be my ticket to Hollywood. I wrote a musical; an acting coach saw it and put me on his course for free while I wrote for his company.
I saw a documentary on the Naadam festival that happens in Mongolia during the summer. One of the features of it is a horse race across the plains that all the young men enter - some as young as 12 years old. It's such a spectacular sight. It's incredible to think that this is a tradition that has been going on for centuries.
Gus van Sant I met at the Berlin film festival, and he came up to me. He had a little film in the festival called 'Mala Noche' that he had made for $20,000. He said: 'You are one of my favourite actors. I'm doing 'My Own Private Idaho' with River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. You should be in it!' Then I started working with Gus.
My background is in largely in theatre and acting. I grew up in a town with a well-respected Shakespeare Festival, and I fell in with some kids whose parents worked there. We staged all-kid versions of 'Hamlet', 'Cymbeline', a few others. All the while, I was making short films; monster movies, slapstick comedies, claymation.
In the late '70s I was asked to sing for the first time in Germany. I'll never forget it. It was at a festival in Bremen. The German audience went berserk and the reviews were a phenomenon. For some reason the German audience understood how technically challenging this music was; it wasn't just someone yelling their head off.
'Power breaking,' also called Hanmadang - which means something like celebration or festival in Korean - involves breaking large amounts of wood, concrete, granite, and the like with specific hand and foot techniques. Practitioners rely on repeated resistance training and the idea that, over time, the body can adapt to stress.
I decided to restore 'Napoleon' after a widescreen festival at the Odeon Leicester Square in 1968. It was run by Richard Arnell and George Dunning, who animated and directed 'Yellow Submarine,' and they'd got their hands on the last scene, the triptychs. They just showed that part, without music and with the projectors misaligned.
'Easter' is a movable event, calculated by the relative positions of sun and moon, an impossible way of fixing year by year the anniversary of a historical event, but a very natural and indeed inevitable way of calculating a solar festival. These changing dates do not point to the history of a man, but to the hero of a solar myth.
I felt a real strong connection and still do with Hanukkah. So it started out by doing concerts on Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights tour, and then, yeah, let's make some Hanukkah songs. Let me make a Hanukkah song that kids can listen to, party to and get the spirituality of it, because it is not just about dreidels and having fun.
When I was working for Miramax, before Sundance, a videotape of 'The Blair Witch Project' - of the full, completed movie - went to a lot of the buyers. And so we all saw it before the festival, and I passed, a bunch of people passed... Then I watched the movie marching toward success, and was reminded by my bosses what a dope I was.
I first visited the Toronto fest in 1979, its fourth edition, when it was known as the Festival of Festivals and had an audience of about 40,000. I happily returned to the 10-day skein nearly every year thereafter, as attendance swelled to 400,000 and it grew into the most influential film festival in North America, perhaps the world.
For some time, Scotland's greatest exports to England have included whisky and Scottish MPs. Or, in the case of Charles Kennedy, both. All these links, politically, economically, culturally, are part of my Union. Would Glasgow's brilliant Commonwealth Games or the Edinburgh Festival be any better for our being independent? I doubt it.
A couple of months ago, I was down in Florida for the Food and Wine Festival. And this journalist grabbed me and said, 'How does it feel to be a TV guy? You're no longer in the restaurant business.' And I laughed. I asked him, 'How long do you think it takes me to do a season?' He said, 'Well, 200 days.' And I was like, '200 days? Try 20!'
I did a music festival in France. I'm not going to name names, but there were bigger bands and DJs on before me, and throughout their set, all I could hear them chanting was 'Hodor!' And I was, like, 'Oh, please stop! It's so disrespectful to the other acts!' In a way, obviously, I loved it, but it was kind of embarrassing at the same time.
At a book festival in Fort Lauderdale, I met David Eisenhower, Ike's grandson, who was promoting his book 'Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower,' in which he describes attending the Yankees' 154th game in 1961. The whole family had been following Mantle and Maris chase Babe Ruth's home run record across the country.
It doesn't sound that cool to say it, but I still get nervous for any show. But it's different degrees - playing a small basement of a club versus playing a festival like Firefly or Bonnaroo. The feeling is, 'Crap, I'm about to be blasted in the face,' and once you get started, then it's like, 'OK, I've done this before. I know what I'm doing.'
Style-wise, Valle Nevado is what can only be described as 'hip international.' Brazilians, Chileans and Europeans make the place seem like an electronic music festival transported to an remote Andean valley. Huge speakers blare out thumping, bass-heavy music, while promotoras stalk the staircases selling everything from Red Bull to mobile phones.
