Just in Time for the Weekend...

Robert Birnbaum's much-anticipated interview with Jim Shepard:

[O]ne of the things I tell my students—they will often say to me, "What made you think you could do a gay German filmmaker or something?" I'll tell them, "Any one of these voices you are taking on is an act of hubris. Whether you are doing your sister, your mom, some version of your mom or some versions of yourself. Who are you kidding? You are not channeling a real person. You are essentially inventing. And inventing on some sort of unstable mix of what you remember and what you imagine." Essentially, what you are doing when you are doing an adolescent, when you are 46 years old or you are doing John Ashcroft or John Entwhistle or whatever, you are arming yourself with as much hard information and empathetic imagination as you can and then you are saying that it's essentially an imagined sensibility. You are not really recreating someone else.