It used to be twelve people crowded around a sewing table; now it's ten.
I can write ten or twelve screenplays in the time it takes me to write one novel. This allows me to offload all of my stories. But it's also not as creatively fulfilling.
Italy is a tough country to be a comedian in - I can't invent stuff like this. Nearly eighty crooks in Parliament - that's about one crook in twelve. It's worse than Scampia, the most dangerous Naples slum, which is infested by the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia. There, the criminals are only one in fifteen!
So when I was told to work, ten, twelve hours a day as an assistant pro, I didn't complain. It was normal.
We all lived in the same house, or most of us did. And as far as I can make out we were confined to the property, because at twenty-four hours' notice we'd have to do a gig somewhere. So you couldn't leave the building for more than twelve hours in case a gig came through.
My first real job, I sold Christmas trees when I was twelve for extra money. I did that until I was fifteen. Then I bagged groceries, and I worked at the first Borders ever in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
They told me I had been sick twelve days, lying like dead all the while, and that Whirlwind Chaser, who was Standing Bear's uncle and a medicine man, had brought me back to life.
I started training with singing and dance lessons at the same time. Also, I was taking Japanese lessons too, when I was eleven or twelve. After school, I went to the recording studio.
There's a great charm in theatre; I enjoyed doing it for twelve years and did lots of plays. At this chapter of my life, I am a cinema actor, and I would like to continue to be so, and at some point I would return to the theatre.
By the time I was twelve, I had started my own theater company and was doing plays in the backyard and the front yard and all over the neighborhood, so, you know, I was definitely a lifer even back when I was 10.
