Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I did a play called Throne of Straw when I was 11, at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. It became really clear to me at that point that I enjoyed acting more than any other experience I was having.
If you take a look at our natural history, there's always a moment where the young lion wants to challenge the older lion and, inherently, that's going to be problematic, and I don't think we're any different.
I've wanted to work with my father for 30 years, and I'm really grateful that I finally had the opportunity, and it ended up - the experience and, I believe, the film - better than I could ever have hoped for.
What I ended up doing was kind of crafting an idea for a story, presenting it to a writer - a dear friend of mine, Brad Mirman - and he ended up writing a beautiful script. I should've done that a lot earlier.
Love is a self-manifested notion depending on how lonely you are - so if you're really attracted to someone, and you're really lonely, I think you can fall in love in an instant. It's all about where you're at.
I think the father-son dynamic is interesting. I don't have a male friend who hasn't had some kind of conflict with their dad, and I don't have a male friend who hasn't had some kind of conflict with their son.
You know, I wish I wasn't so young when I made some of my movies, because I thought that's what the rest of my life was going to be like and I'd have all the time in the world to enjoy it. It wasn't and I didn't.
I think just in general there's a bunch of films that mattered to me that didn't reach their potential, and on some level you have to assume responsibility for that. And I think over the years that gets difficult.
If you are going to do something potentially for another eight years, you want it to be something that you can really sink your teeth in and that's going to be different and interesting for this next period of time.
I think when you get the opportunity to work with someone like Lars Von Trier... I mean, Alexander Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, just to work with those actors, you take that opportunity when you get it.
When Julia and I broke up and I was really scared to go into a market or anywhere because I thought, Oh God, everyone must hate me. And that wasn't the case. People said, I'm sorry this happened, man. Are you alright?
I think that the day you've figured out the differences between women and men is the day that you're no longer attracted to women. It's the difference that is so fantastic and frustrating and angering, and really sexy.
When Julia and I broke up and I was really scared to go into a market or anywhere because I thought, 'Oh God, everyone must hate me. And that wasn't the case. People said, 'I'm sorry this happened, man. Are you alright?'
I had never gone to college, I left school at a really early age, and all of a sudden I've got six really great friends hanging out with me every night. And we were a really tight group, and we just had an absolute blast.
There are a lot of movies I'd like to throw away. That's not to say that I went in with that attitude. Any film I ever started, I went in with all the hope and best intentions in the world, but some films just don't work.
The father-son thing, that's a separate thing. This film [Forsaken] was not about that. This was a film about two actors wanting to try and tell a story... and taking advantage of the fact that we looked like a father and son.
Commander I believe in God and his son Jesus Christ and because I do I can say this. Private Santiago is dead and that is a tragedy. But he is dead because he had no code. He is dead because he had no honor. And God was watching.
'24' and 20th Century Fox and Sky TV are not responsible for training the U.S. military. It is not our job to do. To me, this is almost as absurd as saying, 'The Sopranos' supports the mafia, and by virtue of that, HBO supports the mafia.'
I've had some amazing people in my life. Look at my father - he came from a small fishing village of five hundred people and at six foot four with giant ears and a kind of very odd expression, thought he could be a movie star. So go figure, you know?
Yes, I do believe that there is a cause and effect and a ripple effect upon everything everybody does, and they have positive consequences and negative consequences. If you start to focus on the kind of minutia of that, it's really quite extraordinary.
When I started, with films like 'The Bay Boy' and 'Stand by Me', I look back on those interviews and I'm amazed; there's no mention of my father; it's not even 'son of Donald Sutherland.' I caught a bit of a break in that it never felt like a weight to me.
When we shoot 24, there are so many things I have to worry about, from the script to technical things to my performance, that I dont have a second to be bored or take anything for granted. We produce 24 hours of film a season, which is like making 12 movies.
When we shoot 24, there are so many things I have to worry about, from the script to technical things to my performance, that I don't have a second to be bored or take anything for granted. We produce 24 hours of film a season, which is like making 12 movies.
My mother was an extraordinary theater actor in Canada, and when I would finish school, I would go to the theater. I would do my homework, we would have dinner there, she would do her play, and then me and my sister would go home. So I grew up in it that way.
One of the big draws of the show is here's a guy who is ordinary in a lot of ways but, due to his profession, he's placed in extraordinary situations that he has to make right with action and with thought. That's what is appealing about Jack - he takes charge.
I'm a huge fan of Canadian rock-and-roll. When I was growing up, Rush came out with a record called Hemispheres, and I must have listened to that record for two years straight. Even when I was asleep I had it on. So, yeah, whenever I hear a Rush tune, the first thing I think of is Toronto.
I have a very strong political outlook, and that is something I'd like to take more responsibility for in my life. I don't believe in utilising certain aspects of the power I have with celebrity to push that forward, but I would like to make some films that address some of those political issues.
Westerns just thematically, as a genre, have kind of a few tent poles that I really admire, and one of them is this perception that life was simpler back then. And with that perception goes that people were good or people were bad. You survived by your strengths or you perished by your weaknesses.
When I was younger, my whole sense of self-worth was based on whether or not I was working, which was awful. And I had a baby at 20 years old, so it wasn't just about me. At around the age of 30 there was a stretch where I wasn't working - certainly not on anything I liked, anyway - and I started to do other things.
I've always traveled with a picture of my daughter from 1989, her kindergarten school picture, that has 'I love you, Daddy' written on it. She's always made fun of me because I never changed that picture out. It's like my resistance to her getting older. It was the first thing she'd ever written to me and it means the world to me.
I just always liked the company. The people who hung around her were amazing storytellers, whether it was actors or crew. They were just exciting people. And I knew that they were different when I would go see a friend or stay at someone else's house. It just wasn't as cool. So I always loved the theater, and that's where I started: at a theater up in Canada.
I'm not that complicated as an actor. I have a formula in which I work, yeah. But not like Sean Penn does. Sean is one of the few actors I know who can work like that, actually becoming the character he is playing, and get consistent results. I don't believe you can ever be someone else. You manifest different levels of your own personality to come up with a character.
There are very few films that I've ever seen in my life that would be as silent or vacant as something like Jeremiah Johnson, and that to me was unbelievably captivating. You can see the same about [The Outlaw] Josey Wales: there's very little dialogue, and yet it contains such a deep, rich story. I've always thought of the western as American storytelling at its best.
The most significant piece of advice my father gave me early on about acting was, don't get caught acting. Really believe in what you're doing and then commit to it. Even if it feels uncomfortable, even if you feel that you're gonna look like an ass. It's all acting, but find the truth in a moment as opposed to just pretending you have and rather than trying to act your way out of it.