London is a city of ghosts; you feel them here. Not just of people, but eras. The ghost of empire, or the blitz, the plague, the smoky ghost of the Great Fire that gave us Christopher Wren's churches and ushered in the Georgian city.
In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
There must be a story within him/her that wants to come out. That's the reason why 'Dil Chahta Hai,' 'Lagaan,' and 'Rang De Basanti' worked so well: Ashutosh, Farhan, and Rakesh had a story inside them. It's very important that the director should have the fire in the belly to tell the story.
My father's a Southern Baptist minister. I wasn't lighting cars on fire; I just wasn't.
I'm sure some of the characters in 'X-Men' had a lot of physically demanding stuff to do, but my character's pretty much stand-and-deliver, stand there and throw fire at people. There's no acrobatics or anything.
When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.
God, for example, appealed to me as a beardless man wearing a quilted silk cap; holiness was something burning, forbidding, something connected with fire while a day had the form of an oblong box.
When the principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then the battle is your calling, and peace has become sin. You must at the price of dearest peace lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy with all the fire of your faith.
When I was 6 years old, we were lighting firecrackers in the backyard and started a fire. My brother ran out and was pulling water from the creek and pouring it on the fire with a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup.
O what is life, if we must hold it thus as wind-blown sparks hold momentary fire?
