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Growing up in New Orleans and just being in a poverty-stricken neighborhood gave me that same fire that Eazy had to separate himself from what could have ended up being such a bad situation.

My cousin Jerry Lucey and five other firefighters died in a warehouse fire in Worcester, Mass. - my hometown - right in the middle of our old neighborhood downtown when a homeless couple started a fire to keep warm and the entire building went up. My cousin died trying to save homeless people who had already left the building.

What makes Freddy Krueger such a horrible character? What makes him scare you to death? You can't get rid of the guy. He never goes away.

What is it about the component of fire? People have written about it. People have wondered about it.

I once lived in a cottage made entirely of wood, and there was an electrical fire. We all ran outside, and no one got hurt, but the house was demolished.

In the sequence where I am burned at the stake, everything was so casual and hazardous that the bottom of my dress caught fire, and the grips became hysterical as they tried to pull me off the stake.

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination.

I remember in 1967, when there was that terrible fire on NASA's Apollo 1 rocket that killed three astronauts, my father made pure oxygen and we lit this tiny cup and burned it. Suddenly, we had an unbelievable jet and a fire. You just could see exactly what had happened.

I'm fascinated by fire. When I was four, I wore an American fireman's hat all the time, and I still have one in my office today. Glasgow used to be called 'Tinderbox City;' there were always fires, people getting killed.