Short and sweet: in this brief clip from a 1983 CBC interview, David Bowie — who turns 68 today — talks about wanting to be an actor and his “pretensions” of wanting to direct. “The inherent problem of being a rock star who wants to be a legitimate act or legitimate anything else, I think, is that the parts are restricted from the beginning,” he said, noting he’d been confined to a run of “green-eyed, out of space, rock-playing freaks.” That year, Bowie had a hit record with Let’s Dance and a very different kind of role in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence; five years later, he got to be Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ, so the casting diversity he sought eventually came through.