My primary reason for bringing my son on was to have a voice on the show [Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll] that would bring a 25 or 26 year old point of view to it, and my son is very capable of writing that stuff.
I certainly know guys in comedy, I know some actors, and I definitely know some musicians, who have survived to a certain age and make a good living doing what they do, but nobody knows who they are. They wake up every day and they have the ability to get paid practicing their art, but underneath it all, if you scratched the surface, you still get, "If I only had my own show . . .," or "If I only had my own band . . ." It's what people always do when they want to be their own star.
Liz [Gillies] doesn't really listen to anything new, besides Adele, Ariana Grande, and stuff like that. She loves '70s music and old '60s songs. She loves songwriters from the '70s that I hate, like Jim Croce and James Taylor, and she loves Stevie Nicks and old jazz classics.
Rosemary Rodriguez directed on Rescue Me for us, and I love her. She's fantastic with actresses and she's got a great sense of humor. That was a huge thing for me.
Julieanne Smolinksi has a history in rock journalism and she's a huge rock 'n' roll fan, and she was a huge fan of Ava (Elaine Hendrix) and Gigi (Elizabeth Gillies) and of the actresses. I was really lucky to get her, in between seasons on Grace and Frankie.
I wanted a more female point of view.
I was working with Peter Tolan, who was my writing partner on those two [Rescue Me and The Job], and he did The Larry Sanders Show with Garry Shandling, and he always said that the second season is better because you know the actors.
I wanted to get more serialized. I had this idea for an event that would click onto everybody's mortality. I said, "I want somebody to die." Fortunately for me, when I was toying with that idea, John Landgraf, who's the head of FX but also a very smart executive, came up with the idea of the ashes in the maracas. He called me up and said, "Listen, what about this, they get the ashes in a box and when they get them, they shake them and they sound like maracas." And I was like, "Okay, now I've got my throughline."
I've only done two other TV shows [instead of Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll], one was Rescue Me and the other was a show called The Job, which was at ABC and only on for two seasons.
Everybody's vying for people's attention in terms of eyeballs, earholes, and dollars.
The key thing is to get that one splash - that one song or that one video for a song - that catches people's eyes. Because it's all digital content now.
He [ Campbell Scott ] is also a really funny guy which not a lot of people know.
I needed someone really intense, but also somebody with a lot of theatrical credibility.
Campbell [Scott] also directed me in a film with Hope Davis called Final. That was the first thing we did together, but I've known him for years.
There's a method aspect to Campbell Scott character and he really wants to get into his character and he wants to cast to go on a fast so that by the time the play opens nobody's eaten in three days because he wants the audience to feel the pain from the stage.
The second season is generally easier do because you know the actors better and they know the characters better and if everybody likes each other you can really go all types of places.
We've always talked about doing something else and Campbell Scott is always busy and I'm always busy. But when we came up with the idea of doing the potato famine as a hip hop musical, I wanted somebody who was going to bring gravity.
I try and shoot as often as I can, I cross shoot. I have at least two cameras rolling at the same time. So I'll have two actors or two sets of actors at a time so everybody's basically on camera. So when they improvise we have everybody's coverage. And you can then go in the editing room and find the energy still stays there.
I like to give the actors freedom to take what we have on the page and improve on it. And they do that quite a bit.
Once people start to think they've wasted parts of their life, or they're wasting their life as they speak, that means there's going to be great dramatic and comedic tension.
Charlotte Rampling, when she was younger, looked exactly like my wife. That's one of the reasons that when I first saw my wife, my knees buckled. Based on her looks alone, she was already in my kitchen making eggs.
I had a relationship with an Italian chick that was built on just fighting and sex. As much as all women won't let go of stuff, Italian girls won't let go of anything. And she punched really hard. I got tired of the arguing it took to get to the sex.
It's important to have your own space. I've never trusted people who do everything together. I call them "Kool-Aid Couples," because it's like they drank the same Kool-Aid and it's drugged them into constantly gazing into each other's eyes.
You just can't win. Men have very recent land mines in their heads. Women have recorded conversations and photographs in their heads from 15 years ago.
You really want to have a back-up plan, so when you don't feel like acting, or you're getting older and settling down, you can produce your own stuff. So that's when I set about forming my own company and getting creative control.
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