Esquire interview
Torv talks about her role as Nariko in the video game Heavenly Sword:
But the character I play in Heavenly Sword, Nariko, is ultimately protecting her family and this runaway girl. It’s a beautiful game. It’s beyond a video game. The landscape is to protect and to care. My friend is working toward a world where you get an emotion out of the people who are playing it. See if you can make them cry if they couldn’t save the people who they were trying to protect. This isn’t Pac-Man.
ESPN 1050 in New York interview
Krzyzewski comments on coaching his 1000th game:
Afterwards when I got together with family and former players and that was it. I really tried to downplay that with my team because Maryland is so good. They have done a great job with their team. It couldn’t be because we’re playing in my 1000th game that we’re gonna win. We had to prepare for it the same way. You put a lid on your emotions and then afterwards it was just neat to see so many players, managers and people that have been a part of our program for 30 years back and that was a nice thing.
Gary Panter interview
Groening is interviewed along with Mike Kelly. They talk about his role model Gary Panter. They talk about how they met, Panter’s design inspiration for creating covers for Pee Wee Herman and Frank Zappa.
LaLa Vazquez interview
Williams interviews LaLa Vazquez and questions her on her five year engagement to Denver Nuggets basketball player Carmelo Anthony.
I am getting married. I am finally getting married this summer and I waited till today to tell you guys that.
Esquire interview
Lively speaks about a love scene she had in the movie The Town:
I have a sex scene in this film, and that’s never comfortable, she says as the knife blade bangs the plate she’s using as a cutting board. You think, Oh, that’s going to be so awkward. But this scene isn’t supposed to be a steamy one — it’s sort of tragic, because this girl is so desperately trying to keep this man interested. It’s more intimate than most sex scenes. I’m pretty much crying in it.
YC Founders at Work: Posterous
Livingston interviews Tan and Agarwal, founders of Posterous. Asked about how close their original version was to the current version of the site.
It’s actually pretty close. Sergei and I have always been bloggers. The two of us since high school, have always had a personal website that has our thoughts and photos…We were using all these tools. I was using Blogger and Xanga, and we were really frustrated with the tools we were using.. And they were really text based. The idea was that blogging meant having to type out a whole lot of text. Nobody wants to type out text, nobody wants to read it — it’s really boring. We wanted to share photos. Now how do you put photos on the web? Now have to use Flickr, and now I want to share videos — I have to use YouTube. And there really wasn’t a solution to get rich media onto the web…And between all of that email was the unifying protocol that made a lot of sense…The initial prototype was: I want to send an email and I want it to appear on my blog. The first 20 lines of code written were to post from email.
YC Founders at Work: Reddit
Livingston interviews Ohanian about the early days of Reddit. Livingston asks about the “Chicken and egg” problem of building a community with no initial users:
This is one that I have no hesitation in saying, but it always stirs up a lot of controversy. Steve [Huffman] built a really simple system for admins, that is Steve and me, so that when we submitted a link also let us type in a user name. It let us easily and efficiently create lots of fake users. And we were able to browbeat a few of our friends to build up comments. But the rest of our friends and family could not be begged or bribed enough to do it really consistently. The only option we had to resort to was to fake it. But we didn’t have to do it for too long because Paul [Graham] did us a big favor by [profiling us] us in an early essay.
It was at some point about three or four weeks into it that neither Steve or I had to submit or vote on anything, and the site just worked…We could spend the day just lurking on Reddit, that is just using it like the vast majority of people do and not actually generate content. That was huge. That was when we realized, maybe we haven’t wasted this summer and we had a legitimate community.
YC Founders at Work: Dropbox
Livingston interviews Houston, founder of Dropbox. On finding cofounder, Arash Ferdowsi:
That was definitely one of the bigger struggles getting started– having this idea and not having a co-founder. And Paul [Graham] and everybody told me over and over again that this was a necessary condition of joining Y Combinator. I was networking around and letting people know about DropBox and seeing what they though and met Kyle Vogt, a founder of Justin.tv. Kyle had dropped out of school to join Justin.tv and it turned out that he and Arash were both undergrads at MIT, and both from Kansas. The same kind of cabin fever that I had being in Cambridge and watching all my friends move out to Silicon Valley I think Arash was feeling too. So, I put up the screencasts, three or four minute video, about Dropbox and Arash emailed me after that, because Kyle let him know I was looking for a co-founder. We met up at the coffee house at MIT and everything went from there.
YC Founders at Work: AirBnB
Livingston interviews Chesky and Gebbia from AirBnB:
We had a month of runway left, we had very little money in the bank, and had to figure out how to make the next rent check….There was a design conference coming to San Francisco. And here we were thinking we need to make money and we need to meet people. So we put the two together and decided why not make a little designer bed and breakfast for the design conference? We noticed all the hotels were sold out… and that was the lightbulb for us. We pulled out a coupe of Airbeds and we had the original idea: Airbed and Breakfast! We weren’t trying to start a business. We were trying to solve our own problem.
Jennifer Lopez interview
Red Book interviews Lopez about how her children have changed her as an artist.
You can’t help but be more thoughtful and more aware after you have kids. I think they’ve made me feel things in a deeper way and that’s enhanced my work. My job deals with feelings, emotions, and expressing them, so I think my kids have actually helped me be better at what I do. I feel more confident when I’m working than I ever did before because you have that deeper understanding of life, and that introspection really helps me be better as a writer, singer, actor, whatever. They’ve made me feel things in a deeper and more profound way than I ever did before.
TV Chick interview
Woodley talks with TV Chick about relaxing on set, her favorite TV shows, and the impact her Secret Life character has:
Feedback that we’ve got from parents who have come up to us and said like, “Wow, this shows opened such incredible avenues for me and my children to communicate.” I grew up in a very open household where if I had a question about anything, I could ask my parents, and they would answer me truthfully and not hold anything back. I think that really helped me as a child know exactly what everything was.
Crushable interview
Woodley is interviewed for Crushable about Secret Life and whether becoming famous has changed things:
I don’t put myself out there. I barely wear any makeup. I just feel like I’ve kind of taken on the responsibility of being a professional. It’s always awkward for me the whole fan situation, because I don’t know them and they don’t know me, so I want to engage in conversation, but then that’s always awkward too. It’s a very interesting dynamic, but other than that life has just been the same. I’ve stayed with the same friends and have the most amazing family ever, so I’ve been very lucky.
Elle Magazine interview
Morrison gives interview to Elle about his most embarrassing moment on set with a female co-star.
Besides constantly having to wipe the drool from my mouth? Not really. Last week, actually, I was in New York doing a workshop for a new musical with Jessica Biel, this beautiful Argentinean actor Mía Maestro, and Salma Hayek. I really like smart women, and [Hayek] is really brilliant. We went out to lunch a couple times. We had great conversations all week, and she, like, cried when she had to say goodbye to me. It was a great romance without having any real romance.
Alyssa Milano interview
Milano talks about her clothing line Touch, which designs clothes for her female fans and women in general.
It’s sort of a bond I think that I will always have with female sports fans.
ABC News Radio interview
ABC News Radio host David Blaustein talks with Cosby and his socially conscious hip hop project—The Cosnarati—about their album State of Emergency.
I wanted to put these particular philosophies into a media that would be able to entertain people. I think that finding the writers for it was probably one of the best experiences I’ve ever had because working in television and movies with writers, its very, very difficult to get pages that just jump right at you and say exactly what you want.
Talks about Camp
Kendrick discusses getting the Camp role. A cousin to the director encouraged her to audition for the movie:
There was a woman in High Society named Randy Graff, and she’s cousins with Todd Graff, who directed Camp. When I was 13 and the show had just closed, she told me that I should go and audition for her cousin’s movie. I went and I read for [the part of] Fritzi and they did a workshop of it when I was 13, and then when he was finally getting it made, I was 16 and he said the job was still mine if I wanted it. It wasn’t really an age-specific role.
Wrestling101.com interview
Bodhi discusses his WWE career:
Working with WWE was awesome and awful all at once… Being there was realizing my childhood dream and for that I will always be grateful to Vince McMahon and John Laurinaitis… Getting to perform in front of sooo many excited fans at Smackdown and on the live events is an indescribable high! The glitz of Smackdown TV was awesome and made me felt like I was a rockstar but wrestling at the live events was more me because my producers would let me be me and the fans got everything I had!
O Magazine Interview
DeGeneres talks about the work that goes in to her talk show Ellen:
It’s a lot of work to put a brand-new monologue and a brand-new show on the air and find comedy every single day. It’s challenging and it’s the hardest thing I have ever done, but it’s the best-suited thing for me. The more relaxed I get and the more confident I feel, the more I get to play and be myself and say whatever I feel like saying and not worry about whether I’m being a good interviewer. Although sometimes, I admit, you’re talking to people and you’re like, Oh please, have something to say! But in general I’m just more and more confident that if I’m myself, people are going to enjoy it more.
Tameka Foster interview
Williams interviews celebrity stylist Tameka Foster on The Wendy Williams experiment on her career and what she thinks of Usher’s relationship with his mother.
You know a lot of rumors are started by music and record label people. It’s bad because Usher and his mother have a very unique relationship. He loves his mother very much. He takes his mother to every award show. Like that’s his date most times. He loves his mother, he respects his mother but they have its almost like a split personality relationship. She’s his manager so when their talking about management, business, numbers, times, dates. It’s like that but that’s mommy. He kisses on her, that’s mommy.
Elle Magazine interview
Cusack gives interview to Elle about his most violent encounter with a woman.
I was in Almería, Spain, on the set of this movie Straight to Hell. This great female singer, who I won’t name but who was going out with Elvis Costello at the time came over to me. I think she may have been trying to make him jealous, because she said to me, Give me a kiss. I looked over at Elvis Costello, who’s one of my idols, and said to her, Not a good idea. And then she round-housed me to the jaw.