Ry Cooder

I wanted to be a car pinstriper, but there was nobody to teach me how to do it. So I said, 'Music's good too. I'll do that maybe, since I can't work out how to do this pinstriping.'

Sure, immigrants will do work that no-one else will do. There was even a movie about it - 'A Day Without Mexicans.'

You have to be able to improvise and respond to what's going on around you. Then you might get a good piece of work done.

Geronimo' was a huge amount of work. That involved 80-piece orchestras and Indians and Tuvans and all kinds of crazy people on that thing. That's a real circus, that score.

Film work is a job I like to do because I really love to solve problems.

I always have felt that most people don't have the first idea about what musicians, in the traditional sense - I don't mean in the modern media fake way, but traditionally - what they went through, what their lives were like.

I used to sneak gospel tunes into my old records, just as kind of a personal thing.