Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens. ↗
Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail. ↗
The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. ↗
I liked the way they treated the first, second, and third place finishers equally. It was an amazing year. I only entered two song contests this year; I won one and placed second in the other. And I entered each of them a day or two before the deadline. ↗
One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids, in particular, are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad. ↗
This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English. ↗
The more decisions you make, the better, statistically, your odds of success are. And what I also learned was, it doesn't matter: anything can be fixed. When you're directing, you can agonize, but you can't indulge. Stuff has to happen. ↗