When you work at a magazine, you have to tell the truth. When you're not working in that format, it's fun to see where your mind takes you when the dictates have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.
I gravitated towards the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic.
As a songwriter I hate this whole, 'If it's a sad song, it has to sound like a sad song thing.' And that goes all the way back to my days with the Format. I'm an insane narcissist, so if I have to get something off my chest, I'll get something off my chest.
Everyone loves a slice of period-drama-pie, but I think the success of 'Upstairs Downstairs' is really down to the wonderful format that Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins created.
I'm a big watcher of sports, consumer of sports content, so I love documentaries; I love the format.
I did write more mainstream stuff with DK. But you could always tell the records that I wrote in contrast with everybody else's because the format was a bit different. The harmonies were used in a different type of way. Way more metaphors in the mix.
American shows can go on for 20 years. I respond more to the British format. Three seasons is a long run for them to tell a story.
The projects I have done on television, they're sitcoms, situational comedies. The problem is, maybe because they go on every day, Monday through Friday, one-hour format, maybe that's why they're labeled as a telenovela. But technically speaking, they're sitcoms because they're situational comedies.
The first thing I became interested in in terms of 'Brain Storm' was neuroscience, and that is like saying you're interested in the universe. So ultimately I knew if I was going to handle this in a fictional format, I would have to take a subsection of neuroscience, and that turned out to be the use of neuroscience in criminal courts.
A certain kind of film is a big theatrical film and a certain kind of film isn't. It doesn't bother me so much that you can pick your format.
You need to be naive enough to do things differently. No big publishing house would have allowed us to co-create a fully designed, four color business book in landscape format - because it was contrary to the publishing industry logic. However, we thought of Business Model Generation as a product, not just a book - similar to Apple products.
'Wings' was a blessing, but it was also very difficult. Whenever you do situation comedy, no matter how excellent the execution - and we had a great cast and great writers - but the format is somewhat limited.
Country music's always had the best musicians in any format of music, and I always gravitated toward that, stuff that was musically interesting.