I like what Cheech said recently: “We both got to tell our stories, and nobody got killed.” There are always two sides to every story. The fact that they were both willing to sit down and talk individually gave me greater context. I always knew that I wanted them together, but first, I needed to hear what they had to say alone.
I love how he sees space on a spectrum of human thought, from robotic missions to the actual science that we do, telescopes, observations, and leaping into the imagination. He can discuss all this and reveal his passion for it. He sees our fascination with space and what it means to us on a larger scale, and I thought I could make a movie about this guy.
There are so many levels of existential crisis. The choice that they made was to be proactive, to resist, and also to continue their art, to hold onto their humanity. It’s a juxtaposition that exists within their lives. It held up the most precise mirror possible to the reality of peaceful people who fight and then go home at night and make something beautiful.
“John Williams is a Hollywood icon, and it seems the word was invented for him and has been overused for other people, but I also knew the importance of it to my relationship with Steven, who I’ve known for 30 years, and he’s given me so many incredible opportunities that, not that I ever going to think that I’m going to screw them up, but I just knew that this was going to be one of those situations where I had to hit it right away.”
“I think if you were in a room with people, and everyone said this, if in a room with Keith and Mick and Anita and Brian and everything, people noticed Anita first. She was a very unusual woman for that time, very independent, spoke five languages, traveled, didn’t look to the man to talk for her, didn’t really give two fucks about anything.”
“I think that it was fascinating because we approached it like a narrative movie. We’re telling a story and Albert’s the main character. He set me off to find every archival piece of footage I could find.”
“There is this sort of deep musical culture of the Henson creations. He wasn’t a musician per se, but he was obviously very musical.”
“He was an artist. He would draw and he would draw characters. He would draw little monsters and characters. But puppetry allowed him to take all these different crafts, filmmaking, writing comedy art, and combine them and do something innovative in one new medium, one medium, which was puppetry.”
“Here’s someone who had a passion and who lived for it, who dedicated herself to her art form.”
“It’s kind of the gold standard treatment for OCD. It’s called Exposure with Response Prevention.”
