Nearly 60 years ago, the international community made a commitment to put an end to the crime of genocide by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
To shoot a conventional film means that you are always covering yourself. You are putting nets and, in a way, letting bad decisions take over.
When you are shooting in a conventional way, you put nets around yourself. It's very hard to fall and hit the ground. You can always manipulate things to make it not embarrassing. If the scene is a little bit bad, you can polish it or even take it out. You can hide your mistakes.
From the very beginning, I started doing music performances with a lot of theatrical aspects to them, where humor was a part of it but not necessarily had to be. Humor is just another tool to make the palette more rich and interesting for myself and eventually for the public. It's a great way to break out of convention.
Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there's more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you're bankrupt.
From the time I was in first grade or so, my dad collected 'Star Wars' toy figures from the 1970s and '80s, and we'd take weekend family trips to antique shops and to toy stores. My father collected a crazy amount of 'Star Wars' stuff over the years, and he and I traveled to many conventions.
I had this almost secret life of going to 'Star Wars' conventions because,' when I was younger, Star Wars' had phased into the uncool part of its life and had yet to become cool again for everybody else.
I'm unconventional and eccentric and talk things out, and it seemed that the person I married - maybe in reaction - got quieter and more conventional over time. It felt as if we were putting each other in a straitjacket.
I did not know that for the things that unhorse you, for the things that wreck you, for the things that toy with your internal tide - against those things, there is no conventional guard.
We can raise our sights high when we're willing to break free from being conformists who live a conventional life simply because we are too afraid to express our uniqueness.
