Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You think of 'Outlaw Josey Wales,' you immediately think of the old Indian guy, Sondra Locke, the old lady with the glasses, beautiful old actress.
It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.
When you're a young boy, you're looking at older men for role modelling. Before I loved De Niro, I loved Clint Eastwood; I loved John Wayne. And James Bond.
I did 'Quigley Down Under,' which is quite deliberately placed in Australia, which is a Tom Selleck, Alan Rickman, Laura San Giacomo film from '88, I want to say.
In a very real sense, all you do when you're shooting film or television is you shoot a scene, and then you shoot another scene, and then you shoot another scene.
Once upon a time, they thought I was a sweet, wide-eyed boy that was just trying to figure out how to kiss the girl. Lots of comic relief and adolescent yearnings.
'Animal Kingdom' was an amalgam of two people that I had met-slash-known, not particularly well. They were both very, very scary people for very different reasons.
I think now there's much more of a confessional culture. That's not my bag. I come from a slightly older school of thought: 'give 'em nothin.' You don't plead guilty.
I had a pretty good career at home. What keeps you going is not having a plan B. It's a very good thing. I think if I had a viable plan B, I might not have kept going.
I'm very interested in the history of Christianity, and what I can say for sure is that the Catholics and the Jesuits and stuff were very big on teaching and on learning.
I got the first job and kept going. Once I got a job, I very much wanted to keep getting jobs, basically. I did try to learn what I could in those first couple of decades.
You feel an affinity with younger actors, because, you know, it's a very insecure job. And it can be a long time before you feel like, you know, things might be all right.
The people I've encountered who are really dangerous in my life don't go around with their fangs drawn - they are dangerous because of the way they interpret what's going on.
I was with my grandmother, while one of my brothers lived with my dad, and one lived with my mom. It wasn't a great situation. Acting was the one good thing I was involved in.
I have an intensive relationship with the thing that I'm working on, and I hope that comes through. It's better for me to not worry about the things I can't fix once they're done.
I mean, there's a sense wherein you skip a part of childhood, too, when you start working at that age I did; I was out working and out of home at 15, paying my own way in the world.
As an actor who has spent twenty years trying to crack America, the day I reached the 'Bloodline' set and found my name on a chair next to Sissy Spacek's was the happiest of my working life.
I wanted to keep working because work was essentially fantastic - you got to be around people, you got to be in a family, and that family changed from job to job. It was like being in the circus.
If you've been working since you were a teenager and working at a reasonably decent level, then you don't expect that you're going to be firmly in your 40s and start moving up in the world, if you like.
I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.
At 15 I had moved out of my parents' place, and my options were looking pretty narrow. But I had this acting thing and I just wanted to be able to keep going because it was really good. That was all I wanted.
The very rough story is this: Melbourne boy, out of both my parents' houses at a young age, lived with my grandmother, drama teacher twisted me into doing this TV thing that I thought my mates were doing, too.
I got a good-enough adolescence. I mean, there's a sense wherein you skip a part of childhood, too, when you start working at that age I did; I was out working and out of home at 15, paying my own way in the world.
I never felt like someone who was boyish and coming to terms with asking girls out or anything like that, which was what 'The Big Steal' and 'Spotswood' were about. But I guess that's the impression I left on people.
I remember 'The Yearling' was the first film I ever saw, and my mom told me I cried for about four or five days afterwards. I'd be going along during the day and suddenly start crying over what had happened to the little deer.
It's a tougher gig than what people think it is. The proper, real, genuine, worldwide movie stars don't get a lot of downtime from the world outside. That's a tougher price, I think, than what people's fantasy of fame account for.
Acting is broad enough a church that you can pick your races, decide which way you want to go at different times.I think that the story and circumstance tends to dictate the most and then what you do with your own approach after that.
The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.
One of the things that I found very confronting in my early working life was that people thought I was some sensitive doe-eyed lovelorn boy, because they'd seen me do that a couple of times. What tends to happen is you get a run of similar roles.
There are always dimensions, and the way they get expressed is through the writing and the actors and the director you get to work with on that day. But there are always dimensions, outside of really basic stuff for very young people where it needs to be very clear.
There were the usual types of things that happen, in a production, like logistical bullshit, and this and that and the other. That's the sort of stuff that happened. But I never felt, in a creative sense, that we were ever veering into a place that I hadn't signed on for.
The thing about home is that it's a tough place to sustain a career, just by dent of the size of the place. I had about as good a run there as anybody, but it's still a tough ask. I mean, the person I think with the best career in Australia is Ray Meagher, in 'Home and Away.'
The first 'Star Wars' film was enormously important. I grew up right smack-bang in the sweet spot of all of those. It's true cinema magic. It's fair to say that, as a kid, I would have been very happy to be Han Solo, and I would have been happy to have gone out with Princess Leia.
I think there's a lot of mythos about what's required in acting. The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.
I think some of my favorite Australian films were shot by people that are not Australian. And I think when Dean Semler did 'Dances with Wolves,' for instance, that's a very different-looking Western than what you've seen much of before. It's very rich, color-wise. But we've got our own very proud thing going on.
As soon as you start acting in an accent, you're sort of out of your comfort zone. Maybe people start getting used to accents after a long period of time. But as soon as you do that, it's not so much as capturing the sound of the way other people speak, it's being able to actually be and move around in the sound.