Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Writing-wise, I like to have a lot of things on the burners at once, because when I hit a wall, I like to move on to the thing I haven't hit a wall on.
On a personal level, just for me in my own work, I would say the most interesting thing has been getting to work with the people that I've worked with.
There's part of me that's grateful for the delusion, because it takes a very hard shell to get started as an actor, and I don't have a very hard shell.
I grew up in L.A., and I don't think I've seen L.A. onscreen in a way that felt real to me. There are definitely movies, but they are few and far between.
I think, a lot of times, directors assume that whatever they get from you the first time, whether it be at an audition or on set, is all that you can bring.
I was really surprised when I started working and realized that you're actually on your own, a lot of the time. It makes you really responsible, as an actor.
I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.
Well, I have a sister that I'm very close with, and that relationship is probably the most intense relationship of my life to date, probably of my life, period.
Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.
It's fun for me to be with someone who loves reading as much as I do, because he'll give me things to read that I wouldn't normally seek out, and I think vice versa.
I grew up speaking Spanish. The woman who helped raise me was only Spanish-speaking, so it was one of my primary languages as a kid. And I lived in Spain for a while.
I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women.
So often you're asked to play impossibly perfect version of yourself on screen that it's nice to get to bring in those parts that you think aren't as worth looking at.
I encourage everyone to read James Baldwin and Malcom X and Aldous Huxley. To read Primo Levi. To read 'Silent Spring.' To read Toni Morrison. To read Zora Neale Hurston.
I love bad movies, whereas going to the theater for me is a painful experience. I think it's really hard to sit and watch actors do something live and have it not go well.
I read a lot of plays as a kid, but I didn't see that many plays, so I feel better-versed in film history and film structure. I just think it's easier to think in pictures.
I wasn't raised in a family that cared about how you look. The fact that I have made my living in acting, where that matters, that really feels antithetical to me as a person.
There's something really earnest inside me all the time. It's not a cool or fun way to be. Sometimes I would like to experience being someone who's not wired the way I'm wired.
When I look back, I can say that the summer when I was 19 was a formative time for me. But at the time I just thought I was making tofu every night for dinner and going to work.
You can have a wonderful time doing a movie and believe in it completely, and then you see the final product, and it doesn't look anything like what you thought it was going to.
I don't feel like I have a super straightforward relationship with the idea of fame. It makes me sort of level things out in my own brain almost immediately when I meet someone.
I don't love the word "quirky." I think it's a word that's a catchall. It's a word that doesn't stand in empathy with the person, it stands in judgment of them. It's a very externalized word.
People really do make the assumption that I had some weirdo Hollywood upbringing, but my parents are incredibly down-to-earth people who worked really hard to raise us in a way that was health.
I feel like a lot of my work on stage, I've gotten to play a wider range of characters than I have on film. This feels closer to who I am than stuff I've played on stage, or, like, Olive Kitteridge.
I don't think a lot of people are like, "I'm just quirky!" Or if they are, it's a stage they're going through as they figure out who they are. I never felt like I was choosing roles that were quirky.
I almost never write because I want something from my audience. Almost everything I've ever written, I've written because I feel like I have to write this or I'll die. Like, this has to come out of me.
I think for acting on stage and in film, one informs the other. Obviously, they require really different kinds of discipline and really different kinds of work. It's more along the same continuum, for me.
There aren't a lot of movies being made about women, period. Most of the time, the roles that are available are the sidekick, the friend, the girlfriend or the wife, and they just aren't that interesting.
If I was born into a household with anxiety about money, I wouldn't have had as much freedom to be in my own world. So it's impossible for me to divorce the privilege of my childhood from the other things.
I remember being two, maybe, and hearing my mum's typewriter in the other room and sticking my hands under the door and screaming, 'Mum! Mum!' I was so angry she wouldn't come out. I got used to it quickly.
And I think the female creative urge is intrinsically biologically linked to our ability to give birth to a child, even if we've never... I've never given birth, but I feel like it's part of our psychology.
There are a lot of words that I knew first as a reader, and I never put the pieces together in my brain. The word segue I thought was pronounced "seeg," I think until I went to college, which is horribly embarrassing.
I don't feel like it's a time to be shy about raising my voice, and I don't think that the things I'm raising my voice about should be alienating. If it's alienating to a "fan base," then I'm not responsible for that.
When you're in the editing room, as a director, you get the opportunity to look at your work. As a writer, you can rewrite. But as an actor, unless you're watching playback, you really rely on the director to help you.
I just went through my childhood attic with my sister. I'm not an expert, and I don't mean to put myself in that category, but thinking about Malcolm Gladwell and the 10,000 hours, I was like, Here are my 10,000 hours!
But my family's really close and I was interested in what Mommy and Daddy did for a living. So when Mommy and Daddy had a script that wasn't totally age inappropriate, they would let me read it. And we would talk about it.
I am very much in the instant-gratification camp. I am too much of an actor not to be. I am used to doing my work and having someone comment immediately. So I think that I'm a little hooked on that gratification structure.
Too often in the theatre people can't wait for intermission to get some chocolate or something. But with Come Back, Little Sheba I just hope people leave feeling like they've spent a really good two-hours in that house with us.
I think from my earliest childhood, I liked to tell stories, put on plays and write things. It's funny to think of it as an "artistic bug" because I didn't necessarily want to be an artist. It's just who I was and how I communicate.
And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.
Most adults get to a point in their careers where they feel secure, where they have a body of work behind them that will ensure longevity, and for actors, it's just not like that. You're basically always a temp, going from job to job.
I just don't care that much about how famous I am. I care a lot about our world, and whether our planet will survive. It seems really low-stakes how many Twitter followers I have, in the grand scheme of things. In 80 years, who will care?
Maybe this is a way of gaslighting myself, but I think of it this way: In certain circles, my grandpa was considered to be one of the seminal directors of the 20th century. I'm never going to be that. So I might as well do whatever I want.
I grew up with my grandfather [Elia Kazan] being famous in a way that's not like Beyoncé, but famous in a relative way. It made me feel weird about the way that we treat people that are famous, and it made me feel weird about fame in general.
I am proud and embarrassed by how incredibly self-confident I was in my late teens and early 20s. I know that there were other things going on, too, but I had an overwhelming belief in myself. Like I said, I'm embarrassed by it and proud of it.
I think a large part of an actor's job in preparation is just making the words feel organic to them, and obviously they came out of me, so they felt organic to me already. And then I think then it was all about clearing away all the other voices.
I had a real feeling of being fated to be an actor and do my work, and I remember so much speaking up in a room full of people who authentically knew as much or more than me, and feeling like I was absolutely equal, and what I had to say was important.
Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.
I have a lot more writing experience than Paul Dano has, so to be able to put that experience to use in exercising his vision was almost an acting exercise: How would I write if I were Paul? When I look at it, it feels so completely his, but it's also mine.
I have a sister that I'm very close with, and that relationship is probably the most intense relationship of my life to date, probably of my life, period. I think that when you're close with a sibling, especially a sister, it's a relationship unlike any other.