interview
You are viewing stuff tagged with interview.
You are viewing stuff tagged with interview.
From an extended interview, whose quality I can not yet attest to as I have not finished reading it, Billy Joel on Not Working and Not Giving Up Drinking:
If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living?
Stanley Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaningless of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism—and their assumption of immortality.
I find it easy to trust the hard-earned truths of a successful comedian. For example, here’s an excerpt from a recent A.V. Club interview with John Cleese:
A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people. There’ve been two or three examples where, just really laughing, it all goes away. I remember David Niven taking me out to dinner with Connie [Booth], my first wife. And we were sitting in the open air, drinking pinot grigio in the middle of Rome. There was an editor there, a really nice editor, but being British, he had terrible teeth—Americans have never seen teeth that bad, unless they read National Geographic. And David told us, “He’ll smile a lot, but he’ll never laugh.” Every time David made us howl with laughter, we glanced at the editor, who was roaring with laughter, trying to keep his lips together. Um, so what I’m saying is that when you’ve laughed like that with someone, it connects you at a humanity level.
Katy showed me this hilarious Monty Python sketch on the DVD’s I got her for Christmas. It’s called the “Silly Job Interview.” I like how the guy starts hyperventilating with “Oh dear, I don’t think I’m doing very well!”