Articles & Interviews

Yahoo Internet Life Interview Continued...

E-mail is a great way to start new relationships because of the safety of anonymity. It frees you up so you can say things you probably wouldn't say, reveal stuff that you may be too self-conscious to reveal in another type of conversation. If somebody knows who you are, you're always considering your self-image; you're protecting it. But if you're anonymous, well, that's this different thing. You can say any damn thing that you want to. You can particularly say stuff that's true--really true, which is often tough territory: to say what you really feel, what you really want to say.

On the Net, of course, you don't know if what you're hearing is true, and there's the rub. It's gotten a lot of people in trouble. But my character is earnest. There's nothing diabolical about the way he uses the Net. As Meg Ryan's character says, "One day I wandered into an over-30 chat room, and there it began."

It's the story we hear these days on the afternoon newscasts: "Here are two people who fell in love online, blah, blah, blah." It happens all the time by way of the great vox populi of the Internet. It's a safer place than bars and other places you could meet someone--and it doesn't matter what you look like. Then if you take it to the next level and meet, it's either good or bad, isn't it? It's either a dream come true or your worst nightmare. If it's Meg Ryan, it's not bad, but the problem is that you don't know. Who knows what it could be? Which is why it's risky.

In Sleepless in Seattle, the two characters met via the intervention of one of their children. In You've Got Mail, the Internet brought them together. Either way, the bottom line is that it's a gamble. It's just different ways to meet people.

That's not to say that the technology isn't mind-boggling. It is. Back when we were kids reading Weekly Reader, we all believed that we were going to be living in cities under water and traveling by hovercraft, but no one imagined that we could have these relatively simple machines on our desk that would allow us access to a world of information or to communicate in such a remarkable way. Not even visionaries like [science-fiction author Robert A.] Heinlein imagined communication as instantaneous as this. I'm 42, so I still remember when it was impossible, and now I keep thinking, "This is incredible!" All the clichés are true: The world really is smaller.

Technology is certainly changing the movie business. Ultimately, movies still are projected images on celluloid via sprockets--a lot of moving parts. But making movies has been transformed. The editing process, using the Avid, is lightning-quick. Things that used to take weeks take hours. Things that used to take days take minutes. People e-mail scripts back and forth. It gets easier and easier.

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