Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I know the power of going to Mount St. Helens, and to see that level of devastation is quite something - the power of tsunamis, etc. But it's human cruelty, the base level of humanity, that scares me most.
One thing I love about Cormac McCarthy is the types of pressure he puts onto people. You see the best and the worst in people, you really see what humanity is made of, and I think that resonates in some way.
When you're working with an ensemble, I think you really need different energies because you don't have much time with each character to make them feel real. You want strong personalities that are very different.
Comedy, I'm still in awe of. I think you need a comic genius somewhere in the mix. It's got to be the actor or someone. But the 'comic genius' actors are the darkest people on the planet - and that kind of scares me!
If you're a horse in a race, if you don't have blinkers on, and you turn your head and look at the audience, you're just going to trip up and fall. So I tried to never get intimidated by McCarthy's legacy, and I tried to ignore.
Even on a large ensemble where their parts are relatively small - because having ten main characters obviously affects their screen time - the thing that attracts great actors is when there is that challenge to get some reality into something.
It's the aspirations that capitalism is promoting as beautiful, positive attributes that are dangerous. All that is in the bedrooms of the poor and in the villages of the Third World, and it's like a cruel carrot that's being waved in front of people's noses. It's a seduction, an unattainable dream.
My own personal aesthetic is all to do with real actors and real locations and a kind of almost hyper reality and actuality to things. But the digital world, I explore that through other mediums, with music videos and commercials. Even 'The Road' was a real learning curve for me with digital effects.
There's major changes happening with technology and economics. But unfortunately, the initial reaction on any new frontier, it gets bloody, and people are overreacting, and very defensive, and they're not taking risks. In fact, they're taking such safe measures that they're shooting themselves in the foot.
I'm an Australian. And I'm speaking generally here, but Australians in general aren't patriotic or nationalistic. Our country was built by immigrants. So, by my experience, I've seen the way immigration has transformed nations. They are the key people who quite literally build civilizations, be it culturally or musically.
The problem with an economic meltdown is that the responsibility and the challenges to deal with the environment are squandered. That's an age-old battle in terms of the major conflicts in places like Afghanistan, etc. So there are age-old battles that'll keep going on. Unfortunately, man is a very slow learner, and we tend to repeat mistakes, as opposed to learning from mistakes.