I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang Tod Browning and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre.

Rock n' roll as a genre is different from pop and hip hop: it is about bands and that for me suggests brotherhood family friendship and community.

There is no winning or losing but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you're involved in whether it's a fantasy game the Wild West secret agenst or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.

My folks have played everything from rock disco pop funk and blues. My dad has always brought and played different genres like jazz classical and Latin. With all this in my pocket I feel I have a taste of everything for my influences.

In the old days a TV sync was perceived as not so cool or whittling away at your indie cred. Now it's seen as much more of an opportunity than a sellout as a way to find fans who wouldn't have ordinarily come across their genre of music.

What I like about the 'Underworld' thing is that it's a mix of cool genres as well as creating its own message.

It's cool to play a vampire and be a part of this new hot genre.

So there's nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who's cool hates - and then making it cool.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera theater music and dance are thriving all over the world but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery the feeling of righteous anger the feelings of pathos and sadness or sentimentality of being moved by something.