Thinking back on it, I've been in this business since I was 3, and I grew up in musical theater, so I was raised and surrounded by gay men and gay women. I was hardly around anyone straight.
The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
I was very driven in high school. I worked a bunch of odd jobs. I never partied. I never drank. I was just a theater geek who was obsessed with movies.
I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it's been something that I've always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.
You can work really hard on your physicality, on your craft, on the films you do. You can choose the best of directors, the best of productions, get the best technicians, you can put your entire body and soul into the making of a film, but at the end of the day, it all depends on the mood of that one audience member that goes into that theater.
I think theater is very much my natural home. But the truth is that the older I've got, and the more I've written film and television, I find it incredibly hard to write theater.
The Smith Center is a theater where you want to keep the lights on. The acoustics are amazing, and this is a stage that was built for sound.
In the James Cameron blockbuster 'Avatar,' 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na'Vi, Pandora's 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.
Security theater is the idea of putting on a big show of security in order to make people feel safe. That's why the TSA screens everything and takes your stuff away.
My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.
