It is interesting the way you create something and send it out into the culture, and then the culture kind of goes berserk.
Americans are notoriously ill-equipped for self-reflection. We're usually a very boisterous, outward-moving bunch of people, but we don't understand that much about ourselves or how other people perceive us.
Criminality is a basic part of human nature.
I've always had an idealistic streak about storytelling in that I believe we owe more to audiences than repeatedly bludgeoning them over the head while stealing their lunch money. We owe them inspiration. That's why I'm more interested now in creating new heroes than hooking up jumper cables to old ones.
I have traveled down this path before - 'List of Seven' and 'Twin Peaks' both have thematic similarities - but 'Paladin' took me much deeper into the intuitive underground. Always bearing in mind Joseph Campbell's Rule No. 1: When entering a labyrinth, don't forget your ball of twine.
I want something that's going to linger and stay with me and give me something to think about and chew over. That's the real objective here; it creates something that doesn't feel disposable.
My grandfather was Scottish and just loved the game. My grandmother was a great golfer and a club champion. Whenever I was visiting them, I got a double barrel of golf lore. I guess it was always in my blood.
People forget that in the early '70s, Saturday was the most-watched night of television of the week. It was where you found 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' and 'All in the Family.'
One of the things that's unique about Louisiana politics is that people here have a much more realistic attitude about who their politicians are. They know they are human and not saints or Mormons or Eagle Scouts.
The superhero genre speaks to a vast swath of humanity these days, and studios are in the business of constantly renewing their money-printing licenses. I sense we're nearing a saturation point with some of these icons, where it becomes more about the action figures and Happy Meals than it does the mythological heartbeat of the core ideas.
The whole mythological side of 'Twin Peaks' was really down to me, and I've always known about the Theosophical writers and that whole group around the Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century - W. B. Yeats, Madame Blavatsky, and a woman called Alice Bailey, a very interesting writer.
My point of view has always been a bit more offbeat.
There is still a wildness inside people that we've spent millennia trying to tame.
