For ‘Chungking Express,’ the way we shot the film was all handheld and with all this existing light, and that became very popular. Everybody thought it was cool.
Hey, I was raised in the church. I was an altar boy and a choir member. I almost became a priest – until common sense grabbed hold of me.
At around 16, I became obsessed with James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. I was absorbed by the sense of someone trying to break out of an institution but then became interested in Joyces experimental way of writing.
I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.
My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
As a brunette, I had previously been this serious actress. Then I became a blonde and got to play a completely different, comic role.
I listened very, very carefully to the world around me to pick up the signals of when trouble was coming. Not that I could stop it. But it made me observant. That was helpful when I became a lawyer, because I knew how to read people’s signals.
I’m doing a new musical on Broadway, which opens in October called ‘The Boy from Oz,’ where I play Peter Allen. For those of you who don’t know, he became first famous in America for marrying Liza Minelli.
When I was growing up, the brands that were most powerful were people brands, like Michael Jackson or Madonna. They stood for something that, perhaps, wasn’t wholly who they were, which then became an image that they sold. That’s still a brand to me.
No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can’t find the point where these molecules became conscious.
I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14… I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
When the Jewish people, after nearly 2,000 years of exile, under relentless persecution, became a nation again on 14 May 1948 the ‘fig tree’ put forth its first leaves. Jesus said that this would indicate that He was ‘at the door,’ ready to return.
Eventually, it came to this place like, ‘I’d like to direct, but I need to find the story to tell.’ ‘Man of Tai Chi’ became the story to tell.
I don’t condemn anyone for making their choices. If someone chooses those roles, fine. But not for me. When someone stops me and says, You’re the reason I became an actress, that lets me know I made the right decision.
Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It’s harder.
I mean we grew up in a TB bus and I became a TB doctor.
I wanted to be an independent woman, a woman who could pay for her bills, a woman who could run her own life – and I became that woman.
I became an engineer because I believe in the power of technology to enrich our lives.
Before I became an orphan of the Holocaust my early family life was stable. I grew up as a German Jew in Frankfurt, and I was in a household with two loving parents and an adoring grandmother who spoiled me. My mother helped my father in their wholesale business and they went to synagogue every Friday.
I needed a way to have the platter continuously spinning while I’m moving the record back and forth. I went to a fabric store. When I touched this hairy stuff – felt – I found it. I rubbed spray starch on both sides and ironed it until it became a stiff wafer. After that, I was able to stop time.
When I first became recognizable from appearing on television, I abused my notoriety as much as I possibly could, at the expense of both my health and personal relationships.
I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn’t know that I’d be going into – when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I’d be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that.
You see, before I became prime minister, the Australian prime minister only attended ever two meetings in the world: the British Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and the South Pacific Forum.
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program.
I would come home and re-create every movie. Our backyard became a battleship, a war zone, a western town.
When I first became involved with PETA, it was on an ‘issue-by-issue’ basis – they interviewed me in my old apartment about animal abuse in the circus as I sat on a leather sofa.
Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.
I came to America with a dream and I made it. The dream became reality. America is built for success.
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Some of the wealthiest people in the world became wealthy by saving money.
In 1980, in 1984, millions of middle-class Democrats became Reagan Democrats, and more of them drifted toward the Republicans with Bush in 1988.
Due to God’s grace and a good director, I became successful.
For me, people in Ireland who became actors would have to go through the Billy Barry’s in Dublin.
I started in local news in South Carolina, so viewers there supported me. We had a morning show that we put to No. 1, and then I moved to San Antonio, Texas, and we became the No. 1 morning show there, too.
As a child I was really into fantasy books with elves and goblins and swords, and I went through a phase for a few years when I was reading endless series. But in the end I became totally fed-up with all these sub-Tolkien rip-offs because they all end up doing the same old things and there’s no rigour to it.
Johnny Nitro was an homage to Eric Bischoff, who, I was his apprentice at the time. I liked that name. Basically, Vince McMahon thought that ‘Nitro’ reminded him of WCW, and when I became the ECW Champion, like, he had a couple times mentioned to me, ‘If you’re going to be a real star, you need a real name.’
No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly.
I became real good friends with John Stockton and Karl Malone and am still good friends with them to this day. It was always good to go see them and then play with them in the 1996 Olympics as well. I idolized John Stockton at the time, I tried to model my game after him.
Rape is the most humiliating thing that can be done to you; it’s the most vulnerable that you can be. But once I realized that, I became a stronger person and faced all my fears.
Being chronically shy I needed to create a persona for myself and be involved with a band where I could be ruler of my own kingdom. Then Pulp became hugely popular and I lost control of it, which is when it all went wrong.
I think Jerry Lee is sad. As a musician, he was far more talented than Elvis Presley. Everybody down in Memphis knows that. Elvis became a movie star because he was beautiful. Not that Elvis wasn’t talented, but Jerry Lee Lewis was incomprehensibly talented as a musician.
I was an immigrant when I came, and one of my biggest things was I really wanted to fit in. I didn’t want to be, ‘Oh, look at that guy;’ I wanted to be part of the crowd. Which is a weird thing, because the more successful I got, the more out of the crowd I became.
I wrote a tennis book about Chris Evert and her then-husband, John Lloyd. It was called ‘Lloyd on Lloyd’ and became a No 1 bestseller.
‘High Maintenance’ became my calling card for the bulk of my television career.
I never admire another’s fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.
As a child I prayed that my calling be revealed – but not with expectation and not with a destination. I became an artist because I didn’t know what to do and I thought it was really fun to make things.
I first became aware of Lao Gan Ma chile crisp at a potluck baby shower in 2016, where a friend brought a bowl of chilled hand-pulled noodles that he tossed with black vinegar, soy sauce, sesame seeds, scallions and a ladleful of the sauce.
I became a vegetarian at 15. I was always an animal lover and, as a teenager, became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of eating meat. It was then that I started to research vegetarianism.
For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate ‘poor’ in our public consciousness with ‘black.’ Terms such as ‘welfare queen’ and ‘culture of poverty’ became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.
My dad’s cooking was magic in the kitchen. But eventually over the years, his personality changed and his ability to remember recipes failed. He became paranoid and thought people were stealing from him, when often he was just misplacing things.
My life became occupied with only a couple of things: go to the stadium and practice, come back home, eat, then go back to training.
John D. Rockefeller apparently became more of a tightwad the richer he got. I don’t know if it is true, but one story I read was about one of his sons having to wear his older sister’s clothes in order to save money.
