"Unfortunately, I keep saying ones that I had something to do with. I was the stunt coordinator on that, and I actually played the cop that arrested her at the end. If I have any kind of acting ability, it’s from watching people like Charlize Theron. I was on the set every day. I didn’t have all that much to do, stuntwise — just safety issues and a couple of little stunt things — but I could watch her work, and see how she got to certain places, and that’s the best possible training I think an actor can have. [Theron did] subtle things right before certain scenes, to get to a certain place. I think, even subconsciously, I’ve incorporated some of those techniques. It’s nothing I can really describe. For the violent stuff, it doesn’t take long. It’s just very easy for me to get from my personality to the murderously violent personality. I think I’m closer to that than most people are, so it’s a short trip. [laughs] But for the emotional stuff, and crying scenes and stuff like that, what works best for me is to use music that means something to me, that reminds me of something in the past that isn’t a good memory. Something like that. That helps me to where I can convincingly cry, because I’ve seen so many actors — and these are whom I consider good actors — who are not convincing when they’re crying. It’s just not believable, it’s too forced. I think that’s obviously one of the harder things to do. Take [Hatchet series’] Danielle Harris. Most often, when you have a character who has to have a lot of emotion like that, you start out as a regular character and become that, like Tamara [Feldman] did in the first movie. Starts out normal and then becomes emotional at the end. Well, because this picked up from the very last frame of the first movie, from the very beginning, Danielle has to be crazy emotional. She lost her whole family and found them dead. So, it’s one thing to be able to get to an emotional point, but to have to do it so many times is the hard part. Lots of people can make themselves cry once, but let me see you do it ten times in one day, and some of those times being after lunch, where you’re talking to friends, and then you gotta get back to that place. It’s not that you just do it one time and they film it and you’re done. You gotta do all the coverage and make sure the emotion matches. That’s the hard part."

"Just like we had a group of friends in Toulouse, we had a group of friends in Chicago, with everybody playing in each other's bands, and really we found a family there. Those were wonderful years, but since then a lot of people have moved to LA, or just moved out. Sam I believe still lives in Chicago. I don't know if he's still making music. I sure hope so. He moved away from this type of music to buying analogue electronic machines and playing around with those a lot and it was divine, but he'd moved away from the pop format the last time I heard him. But I do love Sam Prekop, and I probably have even more of a soft spot for his solo albums than for his work with The Sea And Cake, which I also find superb, but the solo stuff has always touched me more somehow. Maybe it's because there's less at stake. Maybe they're more free and therefore more direct. You don't have to show off your prowess so much, I don't know. But I do like the freedom of them. It's like laughter, the way it comes out. I really like that. I find that in beautiful, well-crafted songs we approach perfection. Not that we should seek perfection necessarily; we're perfect as we are. But for me, artistically and aesthetically, we're coming close to something quite perfect, and therefore it makes it into my list. The album feels so lightly or deeply attuned that you don't have to force it down. You don't force it, you just let it be and follow it. You let it guide you, and that's a big quality to Sam's writing. Sam could probably have been a much bigger star in terms of having more fans, but I think he's probably always protected himself from that, knowing very well it would probably destroy his muse. It's very difficult to not get crushed by too much popularity. You want to please people and meet their expectations, and expectations are just the worst thing. They're the worst poison. They should be absolutely prohibited and fought against, actively. I sense that also: that people when they meet me have expectations. They have a whole story in their mind and then when they meet me and I'm just me it's somehow ah, I'm not what you expected me to be. But that's a trap, the expectation, and I try to avoid it. I try to not have expectations, because most of the time you're going to be disappointed. So why live a life of disappointment, when you can live a life of joy?"