Does Yauch want an alternate career as a filmmaker? “Definitely. That’s something I’ve been interested in for a long time. When you spend a bunch of time making music videos, . . . it definitely makes you start looking at movies a different way and thinking about making movies. So yeah, it’s been something that I’ve wanted to do for 20 years or so. There’s a screenplay I wrote with a friend of mine that I’m figuring out how to get made. It’s about graffiti writers, it’s set in New York in 1981, and it’s about when the MTA shut down the graf scene in New York. I think it’s an interesting period of time. It’s a real piece of American history that’s pretty amazing, that hasn’t really been seriously dealt with, and that’s influenced people the world over, really influenced modern culture. And it’s something that I grew up around, so I’m interested in it.”
I congratulate him on his bold use of a semi-colon in a film title. “That’s one of my favorite pieces of punctuation,” he confides. Since the title is uttered in the movie, viewers can judge whether the semi-colon is warranted. “It’s not clear whether it’s two sentences or one sentence; it might be a continuation of the same sentence, I guess. A good title for sticklers for detail. But maybe not good for people who don’t like profanity.”