Why am I so obsessed with my past?

Well, I'm a true Romantic in the philosophic sense. In that biography of Ravel, there were some interesting things about Baudelaire and the Smybolists that caught my interest. All that stuff about drawing from memory from Method acting (that I was also taught 😎) is a part of my process: as Sondheim said, think like the character that you're writing. - Plus I'm also really into the Twilight Zone. Those writers, I think, follow on from that tradition of using fantasy and the imagination to create spooky metaphors for life. I've read E.T.A. Hoffmann, but 19th Century literature mostly bores me stiff. One of my favourite painters is Marc Chagall, and an art book on him that I bought suggested that the strength of his paintings was the way he suffused his paintings with those old memories of his village in Vitebsk. - Van Gogh, Odilon Redon, Escher and Seurat are other favourite painters. I have a book on Giotto that I really liked as a kid, and that led me to the Pre-Raphaelites. I'm really into pulp art, though; it ties in with my pornography. I'm not even remotely embarrassed that people think my features are pornographic. To me, that's a huge win. I'm proud of my films, and I think they were appropriate for mature audiences. - Emanuel said that I had a talent for writing love songs. That's why he commissioned me. In Aotearoa, we have this rating called M which doesn't have an age restriction Our ratings system is G, PG, M, R13, R15, R16, R18. I thought Portrait of a Knight was PG. I'd say PG-13 for a US release. That's because the cum joke would go over their heads. M is fine too. I genuinely think that a teenager could watch POAK and NZ on Screen obviously agreed. 👍🏻 - I don't think that These Words Are Meant For Someone is R16. I think it's M. I remember watching Epic Movie and those tasteless films at the cinema before I was 16 , so I think that's where I'm coming from. There's no nudity, and there's no dirty language. There's implied cunnilingus, but that's not explicit. The imagery itself isn't, I mean... that's what I'm defending. 🤣 Amanda's Fantasia was also M imo. There's often partial nudity in M films, and that flashing image at the end of Miniature is something that I could cut if the censors are particularly censorious. Totally spoils the moment, but whatevs. 😎 - From what I can gather, the journalists think it's hilarious how much I swear, and that's something that Facebook allows. 👋🏻 So, yeah, I'm very careful (even if I seem frivolous). - I saw Men Shouldn't Sing and The Outwits 48Hours musical when I was a teenager. I thought it was hilarious! https://www.48hours.co.nz/screening-room/2010/christchurch/bechamel-white-sauce/ I also think that there used to be a cultural cringe about NZ musicals, and it seems like that's been slowly changing for the last 15 or 20 years. - 'The Iconosphere' was how that book described the realm that Chagall's paintings depict. To me, that's like Moore's Immateria. That's also the realm that I think my stories inhabit, hence why I use animation to emphasise that. One of my fondest memories from high school was bunking a morning in Year 13 so I could watch Allegro Non Troppo by Bruno Bozzetti. That's the true stoner Fantasia. - I think of all my stories as memory pieces, taking real life and fictionalising it. My Shipwrecked musical is a rare exception to that, but even then it's drawing on my IRL memories of political activism and working in the media. I think it's stupid to say that I should play all those women. I'm not an actor; I'm really not. I've got a speech impediment, and that's why I'm a writer.