Cover Story: A Whole New Playbook
BB: You’d always been pretty interactive with your fans, but in the run-up to the Oscars you had to disengage a bit from the Internet, notably removing your email address from your blog and making your Twitter a one-way channel.
MQ: I started to get too many emails, and a lot of offers for speaking events. A year ago I had the time to [answer them], but now I don’t. … When I’m talking with somebody, I want to be present 100 percent. I’m not good at having clipped, business-like conversations. That’s a good quality overall, and I think people respond to that. But I couldn’t be me with everybody who contacted me, and that was very hard for me. I didn’t just want to write “Thank you” like a robot 100 times a day. That didn’t feel right to me, so we got a booking agent to handle my booking.