“Watchmen is a kind of thrilling thought experiment. What would people who dress up in costumes to fight crime actually be like? Well, they’d probably be fetishists who lived on the fringes of society. They’d all be a bunch of freaking lunatics.â€â€”Billy Crudup on The Watchmen [CNN.com]
“I don’t know if I would call it a comeback. It’s more of a continuation of the greatness she always had. [In one song] she’s incorporated into major illusions. She’ll do dissection, where she’s sawed in half, and transposition, where she’s in one place and ends up in another place. She’s doing all the classic elements of magic. There are three giant [circus] rings with unbelievable things hanging in the air and flying around.†—Ed Alonzo, master illusionist and collaborator on Britney’s upcoming Circus tour [People]
“What a strange, surreal experience it is. A tremendous honour to be nominated — but then you trek across the planet, you squeeze into your tux, you squeeze into a stretch limo, you squeeze through the security tent on to the jam-packed, chaotic red carpet, and then you sit through a very long show (which turns out this year to be far less tacky and schmaltzy than usual). At one, weird moment, some strange force suddenly convinces you that you’re about to win, while you affect to look benign and generous for the camera that’s suddenly in your face; then you don’t win, and you spend the rest of the night trying to be grown-up and sporting. You even try to enjoy yourself.†—Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky director, on his Oscar experience [Guardian UK]
“It is like a Greek tragedy. The characters do not understand the whole picture, but the audience knows the outcome, knows the repercussions, knows that nuclear strength is still something that dominates our lives. They know what happened to Oppenheimer, too, about the relationships, the betrayals. But Oppenheimer doesn’t know these things. It is very important for me not to show him displaying regret or vulnerability based on later knowledge. He is opening a door to the unknown. That’s fundamental.†—Baritone Gerald Finley on playing J. Robert Oppenheimer in the opera Doctor Atomic [Guardian UK]
“You can’t allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don’t consider what you do to have any value at all and that’s nonsense. If I put a value on my music and no one’s prepared to pay that, then more fool me, but the idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan, it can’t work.†—Robert Smith on Radiohead’s no-charge innovation for In Rainbows [Music Radar via Pitchfork]