As an artist, you want to make good stories and create good art; as a businessman, you want to make money and make sure the investors are happy. The two will always clash, unfortunately.
I started going to Madame Louise's, the lesbian club where all the punk bands used to go - the Sex Pistols, the Clash. I remember seeing Billy Idol walk in there; he was gorgeous.
I'll tell you, there's no goodies and baddies in the world, there's just people with intentions that sometimes clash.
I've started movies without screenplays both on 'Clash' and on 'Hulk,' and that is tremendously stressful because you have a tendency to overcompensate with effects. You haven't tested it in your head. You didn't run it over and over again and covered all of the plot holes and figure it out. It's a marathon that you sprint.
What's great about 'The Avengers' is that it's the next step. It's not just superhero fights super-villain and superhero wins. It's about superheroes that come together and interact. It's a clash of the egos. You could do 'Avengers 1' without a villain, just with all these guys coming together. They could sit down and just have a discussion.
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.
Violent statements and threats cannot provide a solution to the problem. They can only exacerbate feeling and make a clash of forces inevitable.
I love my accent, I thought it was useful in Gone In 60 Seconds because the standard villain is upper class or Cockney. My Northern accent would be an odd clash opposite Nic Cage.
If you ask me who the members of the Rolling Stones or Led Zep or the Clash were, I'd be able to tell you every member. But I couldn't name a single member of Arctic Monkeys.
Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.