Me and my friends had BMX magazines and skate magazines, and I was a photographer who made skate videos.
I respect people that are die-hard film people, but I started on video. I started on Hi8 video and mini-DV, and I made skate videos. So, I love film, and I love the way it looks, but I also love the way crappy video looks, or VHS. I've always been a fan of whatever the look is that's appropriate for what the feeling is.
Music is thousands and thousands of years old and I don't think that basic, primitive connection to the language of music ever changes.
Some of the best ideas come from sheer discovery, and not by some masterminded, preconceived genius.
What I learned from the Beastie Boys was to be independent. They set up their own world separate from the label. They built their own studio.
I think, as you're growing up, your emotions are just as deep as they are when you're an adult. You're ability to feel lonely, longing, confused or angry are just as deep. We don't feel things more as we get older.
I don't know what life was like 1,000 years ago, but I imagine there was the same struggle: people trying to connect with each other.
I started directing videos at the same time that Michel Gondry was starting to direct videos, and I watched what he'd do. They all seemed to be pushing some new visual effects idea, but never just for spectacle. They all captured a feeling.
If you compromise what you're trying to do just a little bit, you'll end up compromising a little more the next day or the next week, and when you lift your head you're suddenly really far away from where you're trying to go.
You make a movie that is about what you want it to be about and let people have their reaction to it.
As creatives, it's a hard thing to push, to make something you're truly excited about, especially if you've written 100 different concepts and they keep getting shot down.
I've done a couple of interviews, and I realized how uncomfortable I felt as soon as I started talking.