Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I had done about 60 television shows, from 'Ed Sullivan' to 'The Hollywood Palace,' before I ever went to 'Johnny Carson.' At the time, that was the showcase for comics. And I couldn't believe it.
When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn't really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.
The first act is writing, the second act is filming, the third act is releasing. If you have to partake in the third act, it hurts the first act of the next one. It's like a prizefight. You get punched.
'Drive' came to me because the casting director knew my manager and called and said, 'You've always talked to me about Albert wanting to play the heavy. I think he should read this.' My ears just perked up.
My dad played a character on the radio called 'Parkyakarkus.' A Greek-dialect comedian. He did Friars' roasts and wrote material and made people laugh that way. But he wrote his own shows with other writers.
'Finding Nemo' has spawned so many sort of emotions over the years. I don't even know that you could really understand exactly what parents and kids are seeing in it, but they can see a lot of different stuff.
Listen, there are some movies that are set in stone and the writer or the director does not want to change, but I've never worked on a movie, including my own, that didn't take advantage of a rehearsal process.
Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything - real feelings, true happiness, real joy. They can't get through that fog. But you lift it, and buddy, you're in for the ride of your life.
I attempt to create a form of seriocomic entertainment to either delight, enlighten, or disgust, whichever you'd like. In terms of making motion pictures, I write and direct and act. I guess you'd say I'm a filmmaker.
I never, in anything I've ever done, tried to get you to like it. I was never going to succeed at that. That's not the way most entertainment is made. Most entertainment is trying to get you. It's tested, like toothpaste.
Well, you know, with every character, if you're going to expose yourself, you've got to figure out every detail that you're going to play. So there's no character that you can just go put on his shirt and be fully prepared.
I guess I was the class clown - with a name like Albert Einstein, you don't hide in the back. I'd read the school bulletin to the class, and I'd add activities and make stuff up. It was good, a good 10 minutes every morning.
All improv turns into anger. All comedy improv basically turns into anger, because that's all people know how to do when they're improvising. If you notice shows that are improvising are generally people yelling at each other.
There's always the standard six people you can hire that have played all these villains in Hollywood. Instinctively, when they come on screen, you know what's going to happen. You don't know the story, but you know what they do.
For the most part, improvising while cameras are rolling is very difficult. 99% of people you should never ask to do that, because they're under pressure, the clock is running, 80 people are staring at you...it's always unnatural.
I'm not a person who I ever thought would do well with divorce. Not that it can't happen. I just didn't want that. So I waited a long time to meet the right person. Then I finally met someone that I was willing to be divorced from.
I think I present a different side of a male character: a side that is not John Wayne-like, a side that is, in fact, destructible. To some people, that is refreshing, and to other people, especially if they don't know me, it may be disturbing.
I like to do things that I want to see myself. With 'Defending Your Life,' I wanted to see some aspect of death other than angels and the thing that 'Ghost' was about, because that didn't make any sense to me. So that's the reason: it fills a hole.
I'm really fond of 'Real Life' because I think it anticipated a whole movement. And people forget, they talk about 'Spinal Tap,' but that wasn't... this was a mockumentary a long time before that. It was one of the early, early sort of mockumentaries.
Steven Spielberg seems to have wanted to be a director from 13. He put his dog in a certain position and made him eat at four o'clock. He liked to direct it. But, to me, directing is tedious. Especially if you're acting in it. And I'm inherently lazy.
This getting old is something. I think I envy my dog, because my dog is sixteen, and she's limping, and she's still living, but she doesn't look at me like she knows. She's not thinking what I'm thinking. It's a cruel trick that we all know the ending.
I had a very wise person tell me that he thinks marriage, when you're younger, you keep thinking you can fix things. That's what people do. And you can't really fix anything. It shouldn't be a massive difficult thing every day. Life's difficult enough.
Wouldn't it be great if cars came equipped with screens like that thing they have in Times Square that spells out the news? You could punch out your own instant messages: 'Will the small red car with the ugly driver please stay a little further behind?'
There've been a few mother-daughter movies that are somewhat realistic. But the mother-son movies are more comical than realistic: 'Throw Momma from the Train,' 'Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot.' You don't sit in the dark and go, 'Oh my God, that's my mother.'
If you don't succeed on your own ground, then there's no reason to succeed. Unless, of course, you really want a boat. If you're a person who feels that with a yacht, everything will be all right, then you should do whatever you have to and get the yacht.
The idea behind 'Defending Your Life': Imagine if you had to sit in a courtroom and watch your life. I don't care who you are - if you committed a crime and you had to have all of your emails searched and made public, who on this planet could survive that? Nobody.
I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours.
In the course of my movies, the financing and the releasing were always the tough part. Because I loved the creative; I loved the writing. I loved the making of it. Because, I guess, I never had the giant blockbuster, I never got that sort of ease for the next one.
When I audition, I understand what it takes and the insecurities that come with it. If I do anything, I put actors at ease. I used to tell directors who weren't actors, the best thing they could do was take an acting class for a couple of months. Just to understand.
What's interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It's either a utopia or it's misery. The real truth is that there's going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.
My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don't have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you'll be the richest.
One thing about Los Angeles is it feels like it's not new. It feels like it's already been built, and it's deteriorating, except for the places they're trying to make nicer. But in general, you drive all through the city, and the city feels like it was new a long time ago.
My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called 'New Faces of 1937.' My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds, and she did a few movies, and she was really a great singer, and when she married my dad and started to have a family, she sang at parties.
When I started out, I tried out all my stuff on national television. There were no comedy clubs, but even if there were, I don't think I would have gone to them. I used to do stuff in the bathroom, and then I'd drive down to NBC and do it on 'The Golddiggers' with Dean Martin.
I don't see many explosions or ten-car crashes in the course of my life, so I don't put them into my movies. I would love to live in a society where 'My Dinner with Andre' made $100,000,000. Then I would be in the mainstream. I could do that stuff easier than I could do 'Meatballs.'
I probably learned, being in 'Taxi Driver' before I made my first film, I would come to the set every day just to watch how that film came about. It's like a graduate course: it's terrific. You talk to the cinematographer during the breaks. You ask the electrician why they are doing this.
I like the acting. It's how I started, and I sort of feel that if I don't give it a little shot now, and I go back, then I'm pretty much done with it. I mean, at what age am I going to do it at? Although, when you see Christopher Plummer and Max von Sydow doing it, I guess the answer is 80.
The world really changed after 9/11, not just in the tragic way, but in every way. So it took me a couple of years to even understand how my art form I could process any of this. When the world changed, eliciting laughter with subjects that were funny to me before 9/11 just didnt seem good enough.
I got so good at writing to a budget, my brain was restricting myself. I'd write, "It's a stormy night." Then I'd cross out stormy. I'd write: "It's a calm night." Then I'd cross out night. It's noon. Because you know how much night costs. You know how much rain costs. Nothing comes free in movies.
I don't think the goal is, 'How big a star did you ever become?' I think the goal is, 'Were you able to express yourself?' And if you're able to say yes, in any field, you've won. If you paint, write, do mosaics, knit - if it's solving that part of your brain saying, 'I need to do this,' you've won.
If I start a film of my own, then what I eliminate is acting in other people's movies. Because once I start, and I go raise the money, it's about two and a half or three years, and I can't stop. I have people hired. I can't say, 'Ooh there's a good part called 'Drive'; I'll see you in three months.'
By the way, movies are like sporting events in that you're as good as the movie you're in. You can sit in a room for 20 years and go do a movie and you can just kill in it and you move to the head of the line again. By the same token, you can do five movies a year and if they're dreck, it's nothing.
Even in my comedies, I don't take anger as a joke. I think anger and laughter are very close to each other, when you think about it. One of the things I like about a character: I always think it's fascinating when a character can turn on a dime and go from one emotion to another. I like watching that.
'2001' is a really interesting movie because it came out in 1968, and everybody thought that that was possible, and look how ridiculous that was. We don't have ships like that, and you know, nobody in 1968 was going, 'Oh, that'll never happen!' But of course it never happened. We're not even close to it.
I don't know how, where, and why the idea for 'Defending Your Life' began; the idea had been bouncing around for a while. Stories like that sort of have to bounce. They don't come out of nowhere. I went through my own period of life with sort of everything turning upside down, and wondering, 'Why is it this way?'
My father was very sick around the time I was born. The doctors thought he wouldn't live. He did recover, but I don't remember him as very active. I do remember lots of schtick around the dinner table. Generally, he and my brothers and I were all laughing at the same thing my mother did not find funny, whatever that was.
I started on television. I had five years of network television before I ever got up on a stage. The first thing I ever did was in 1967. This guy Bill Keene had a little talk show at noon, and Gary Owens took over for a week. He knew about this dummy bit I used to do, this ventriloquist thing, and I was on 'Keene at Noon.'
When I was younger, I wasn't concentrating on good days. I was managing a career and trying to have a good year. It would always 'lead' to something, which never leads to anything except death, where everything leads to. And then as I got older, and then I had my kids and everything, I began to appreciate a great Wednesday.
What naturally stops you making the film is there is no more money in the budget. That's really what it is. If you had an unlimited budget, if you were a billionaire and you financed your own movies, then you can either date, because you can sit in an editing room for six years, like Howard Hughes, and never finish anything.
I don't know; I guess they'll never make another 'Nemo.' I see they're making another 'Monsters, Inc.' I had a wonderful idea for them. I swear to God, I think there could be a great sequel to 'Nemo' where the fish never will leave home. He just won't leave. 'Getting Rid of Nemo.' Right, 'You're 30 years old! Get out of here!'