The Almeida's artistic director, Rupert Goold, brought me Mike Bartlett's 'King Charles III' with the slightly apologetic warning that it was in blank verse, but, of course, that appealed to me.
A big reason why I'm not a big TV watcher is that in my formative years as a viewer, there wasn't that much great television on, or at least, television that appealed to me.
I was interested in big unknowns, and the brain is one of the biggest, so building tools that allow us to regard the brain as a big electrical circuit appealed to me.
I made my personal discovery of Emily Carr while visiting Victoria in 1981 to write a travel article. Immediately, her strong colors attracted me; her spunk fascinated me. Her down-to-earth voice in her writing appealed to me as authentic and original.
The Western is as American as a film can get - there's the discovery of a frontier, the element of a showdown, revenge, and determining the best gunman. There's a certain masculinity to the Western that really appealed to me, and I've always wanted to do a Western in Hollywood.
I read the Koran and it appealed to me. At the time I was agnostic and it really breathed spiritually back into me. For me it's really a cushion; it's cool, I'm cool with it.
The idea of being Treasury secretary in the abstract appealed to me, but my initial inclination was that it wasn't right for me to take that step.
'Dating Game' wasn't social commentary, political analysis, Shakespearean-level drama or even blunt-force comedy. It was just the televised equivalent of meeting someone at a bar. But it appealed to our most basic Darwinian instinct: selecting a good mate. You can't go wrong when a show's premise is hard-wired into human DNA.
