Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I remember one time I went to a party and I had to interview Reese Witherspoon. She was just in this movie "Freeway," it's like 1996. To prepare for the interview I went to meet her at this release party, and I end up getting in this fist fight with a guy. I'm not much of a fighter but I get in this fight and the press was all there and they saw me, and all of a sudden the next day in the paper was 'Simon Rex and his posse get in scuffle, and Simon crashes a bottle over a guy's head after smoking crack in the bathroom.' I saved the article forever.
But television affords you, what you just described, to - over the course of 18 hours, now that we're doing a third season - tell the story of this man. You're not under any obligation, really, to do massive expositional stuff at the beginning. You're at liberty to say, "Come with us on this journey," and, gradually, you become aware of what his motivations are, what drives him, what his weaknesses are, what his strengths are. That's what I think's sucking people into these worlds, because it is kind of like a novel, you just go really, really deep.
Rick Blaine: We'll always have Paris. We didn't have Paris, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night. Ilsa Lund: When I said I would never leave you. . . . Rick Blaine: And you never will. But I got a job to do too. Where I'm going you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now, now . . . here's looking at you kid.
My experiences growing up - my father lived in New York, so I was going out there in the summers and meeting really interesting people and people having what seemed to me to be extraordinary experiences and really taking advantage of these wonderful opportunities. And so I will go - I would go to the big city and watch these people performing onstage and doing television and films. And then I would go back to Hayward, and it just suddenly felt that much smaller and sort of limiting because I had this hyper awareness of how much larger the world was.
I didn't believe in Bigfoot.I just thought, "No, that would be impossible. You know, we would have found Bigfoot by now. We would've found some skeletons, we would've found some sort of proof of Bigfoot." So, I didn't believe for a long time, but obviously this is the year we find Bigfoot. And obviously all scientists agree that there's definitely Bigfoot.There's no reason to debate it. It's like debating climate change. There's no reason to debate climate change anymore. There's no reason to debate whether there's Bigfoot. Clearly, the yeti exists.
I would say that among my many huge emotional miscalculations was my taking a film career for granted. It is the most awesome privilege to be able to use one's imagination and wit, physicality and musicality, conscious brain and unconscious instinct in the service of a work that has a chance to move and excite and amuse and delight people all over the world, including long after we're dead. What a noble calling! And I felt it was just there for me as a kind of given, some sort of inherited birthright-when in reality it's the most magnificent luxury.
I've always enjoyed stories that take place in the future but my one disappointment was that the future books described never came. We're not on other planets, there are no flying cars, and the only robots we have in our homes just sweep the floor. So I wanted to write about a future that I thought could really happen. People ask me when I tell them the title of the book, 'Are we all dead?' The good news is, no. We're still here. And I even think the future in my book is strangely hopeful, although I'm sure there will be people who strongly disagree.
A few years ago, when I was writing songs for my first album, I was staying with Michael Feinstein as I often did. I was working on a pilot. My grandma was very sick at the time. She died of complications from alcoholism. She always used to say [in his grandma's voice], "Red wine is good for my heart. That's what my doctor said." And we'd say, "Yeah, but not for breakfast." Unfortunately, it was the thing that killed her. I felt inspired to write a song about her and what that meant for her life and for all of us. I was writing it in Michael's house.
I came home [after funerals] and I thought if I go back to California, where I had a small house, I don't think I'll ever come east again. So I decided to stay and go through the halls and stairways, talk to Gilda Radner, holler, express some of my anger and make sure there were no ghosts in the hallways that I should ever be afraid of.And then I found out - it sounds strange, but I found out she had left me the house. We never talked about her dying and what she was going to leave me or I would ever leave her. We just didn't talk about those things.
What I'm angry about, and I've gone on record saying this, is I think that financiers get away with murder. They realize they can get something for nothing and they won't settle for anything else. There's something called a Schedule F. If I work for a Schedule F contract that basically means I'm doing the movie for free because by the time I pay all my commissions and taxes there's barely anything left for me to live on. This whole notion that you do work that you love for very little money and then you go out and do something you hate to make money.
I wrote a letter to the magazine [Time magazine] pointing out that [Richard] Corliss's comparison of Christopher Lee's Saruman to Osama Bin Laden, and the vastly outnumbered defenders of Helm's Deep united against the Orcs to the "Coalition of the Willing" fighting the good fight against Muslim hordes, displayed the simplistic, xenophobic, and arrogant worldview that makes the government of the United States feared and mistrusted around the world. The editors claimed they had no space to print my brief letter, which I felt was dishonest and cowardly.
The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.
I was not going to be an actor. I was an engineer in physics. That's what I did: I graduated with a physics degree, and I had become a little bit distressed that I'd have to work for somebody - anybody! And I thought, "I'm not going to make a mark on anything. If I can't express myself, then I don't know what the heck I'm going to do with this life." I think it was just one of those germs that said, "No, no, no, you've got to say things. You've got to tell people things. You've got to express your opinion in this life, because that's how you started."
Pretty early on in making the first movie I realized that this is what I wanted to do. I felt like by that time I just found my niche, like this is what I was supposed to be doing. So I completely submerged myself into the world of watching movies, making my own movies, buying video cameras and lights. When I wasn't making a movie, I was making my own movies. When I wasn't making movies, I was watching movies. I was going back and studying film and looking back at guys that were perceived as great guys that I can identify with. It just became my life.
Fundamentally, as human beings, we're very, very alike and a lot more alike than we think, but we have a tendency to divide the world into them and us. In prison, when people commit a crime and we put them away, they definitely become "them." We don't want to deal with it because they have chosen to step out of society, so we're going to keep them out. Even if they serve their time, we're going to make sure that, for the rest of their lives, they're going to be branded. I don't know how to do it in a different way, but I think it clearly doesn't work.
All I'm telling you to do is to be smart about it. Know that if this man isn't looking for a serious relationship, you're not going to change his mind just because you two are going on dates and being intimate. You could be the most perfect woman on the Lord's green earth-you're capable of interesting conversation, you cook a mean breakfast, you hand out backrubs like sandwiches, you're independent (which means, to him, that you're not going to be in his pockets)-but if he's not ready for a serious relationship, he going to treat you like sports fish.
I'm here to tell you, though, ladies that the term "gold digger" is one of the traps we men set to keep you off our money trail; we created that term for you so that we can have all our money and still get everything we want from you without you asking for or expecting this very basic, instincual responsibility that men all over the world are obligated to assume and embrace. ... KNOW THIS: It is your right to expect that a man will pay for your dinner, your movie ticket, your club entry fee, or whatever else he has to pay for in exhange for your time.
I feel like that [the role in Star Trek] is a prime example of, yeah, I got that role and it was awesome, because it changed a lot for me professionally, but then creatively, it became a whole other thing, with J.J. [Abrams] and Chris [Pine] and the people I got to know. Now I just feel like it's our jobs to be open and to keep moving stuff forward. I don't know what that means. This is the first time in a long time that I have no idea what's happening next. As scary as that is, and as anxiety-provoking as that can still be, it's also really exciting.
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. So the next one was always, "how am I going to do this?" And that thing was sort of always the thing that made me a little chickenshit to go into the next one. The writing of it was great and the making of it was great, but how am I going to release this thing and am I going to find a studio?
My problem is, whether it's for emotion or for the talents that a character has to have in a role, I find it very difficult to not take on a challenge. I need to say, "Okay, enough, take the easy road." But the easy road for me is not - it might just come out coincidentally. I wouldn't ever choose a movie because it's easy. I might choose a movie because I feel like being funny, or I feel like being able to do something that is perhaps dramatic, but to a lesser degree. Because I like switching it up, basically, not because I would take the easier road.
When people were like, "Oh, wow, Donald Trump is so crazy. That's so nuts, what's happening?" in the 9 a.m. meeting, Jon Stewart was like, "No, I've seen this before, in Robert Mugabe. I've seen Trump as an African dictator. You guys don't know about nationalist rhetoric all over Europe?" "No, I thought we were the center of the world." He has the ability to actually talk about that in a real way: "Oh, I've been there. I've talked to people there. This is just the remix on stuff that's been brewing for three, four years." That's something very special.
I think in the modern world we really need to have movie theaters or places we can go in and rejuvenate ourselves. I think we'll have less problems with our souls and our health. I do that in my life, and I feel healthy and happy. I need those hours in the darkness where I used to spend time as a kid, sitting in a little closet in the darkness, listening to AM radio, having glowing paint that I illuminated, just sitting there, dreaming about anything, not being disturbed for an hour or two, just alone in the dark. I'm still that little boy in my brain.
Don't get me wrong, Carter Smith is an insanely talented photographer, but as a director he approached it more from a story standpoint. He definitely had an interest in communicating the text and the characters first, and he allowed his cinematographer Darren Lew to really find the visuals - of course, he worked with him throughout the entire Jamie Marks Is Dead movie, it was a collaborative effort. While the movie is very visually beautiful, in my opinion, very visually striking, Carter was definitely approaching it from a performance standpoint first.
Talking about the fact that I get depressed or that I've had some suicidal issues in my life is not easy. I don't know of many comedians who are going all in on that. In some sense, I think I've maybe sacrificed some momentum doing that. In another sense, I'm in a place where if I can talk about that and if it helps some kid in a way that gives them some help that wasn't available to me when I was a kid, then I gotta do that. Put being a good person first. If you have a platform, use it for stuff that's noble and good and worth putting out in the world.
If there's any sort of superpower we desperately need right now, it's this transcendental force that reminds us of union and connection. I think that superhero stories come from somewhere. We make these aspirational images, to remind us that we have this capacity in ourselves already. I think that electricity can run through disconnected wires. Superheroes, every single one of them, come from the world of imagination and they're played by humans, they're written by humans, and it's in the belief that we invest in these characters that they come to life.
That scene that I have with Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black is one of my favorite scenes that I've ever done. He's very modest. He's a real hardworking actor. I think he was going through something difficult at that time, and he never brought his personal stuff - not once! - on the set. He was a real pro. I remember doing that scene, and as I was acting, I thought, "I understand why this guy's a movie star." Because there was just something that he did when the cameras rolled. There was some kind of energy that was really magnificent, a real aura about him.
In episodic television you'll have a good guy who's on every week and that's his show! He's the regular on it, and you're not going to be "gooder" than he is; I mean, he's the guy who's got to solve your problem! So if you're playing a good guy, you have to have a problem, and he's going to solve it for you. And the only really strong dramatic part is the heavy, because the meaner and crueler and rottener you are, the better the good guy looks when he whips ya' at the end because he always is gonna whip ya! So, the best dramatic guest shot is the heavy.
The first idea of Captain Fantastic was a pretty radically different one. The genesis had to do with parenting and questions about parenthood and fatherhood specifically. I have two kids and I was grappling with what my values were and what I wanted to pass to my children. So I was positing different kinds of parents and different ways of parenting. I played with various ideas - very permissive parenting, very restrictive parenting and then I came up with the character of Viggo Mortensen, and much of it was aspirational, some of it was autobiographical.
I used to say things like, 'My name's not Al (Bundy), you know?' Not to the press, but to fans. 'My name is actually Ed.' I'd find myself saying that, and I'd think, 'Who do you think they think you are? They only know you from that!' And finally I just got...I don't know, I guess a switch went on for me, and I realized, 'This was the greatest job that you've ever had in your life. Why are you acting like an asshole?' So from that minute on, I kind of...well, I hate the word 'embraced,' but I just kind of went, 'Yeah, okay.' 'So you're Al, right?' 'Yep!'
I know when I watch a film at this point, if I completely lose myself in the characters and the story and the world of the film I know that it's at least in my opinion, that was great. Otherwise I'm thinking: "Oh I know they were just doing A, B and C, right before they walked into the scene, then the camera was there, then they probably took the shot from this reverse close-up and moved it into this." When all of that drops away then I'm like: "Okay this was phenomenal, this was fantastic." I mean, any film or TV performance in general is probably good.
[My grandmother] was the assistant pastor at Palma Ceia Baptist Church in Hayward - my grandmother, Evie Goines. And so my mother was doing - I remember when my mother graduated from beauty college, so I was about 5, and so I guess she was about 21. And I just remember being there, taking the pictures and seeing her get her diploma and everything. But she was doing hair for many years. during that time, she kind of started to discover or tap into her religious studies. It was around the time I was starting to go through puberty and hitting, like, 12, 13.
I came out to Los Angeles for a couple of meetings in the summer of 2005, and I ended up getting a movie called Firehouse Dog for Fox. And I thought, "Oh, man. I'm doing a movie. Maybe I'll work a lot more now. I'm an actor now." Then, for eight, nine months I didn't work after that. After that movie, I began to get some guest star roles, fairly consistently, but because I had been so presumptuous before in thinking that the other jobs would lead to something, I realized: "Just get up. Go to work. Go home. This is your job just like everyone else's job."
The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
I looked pretty crazy but at the time, you don't think anything of it. You think, "I've got an amazing job. I'm working and this is cool." I remember I was being fit to go to a premiere for something at Burberry and Christopher Bailey, who designs the clothes there, saw a picture of me and I looked weird. I had short black hair, hardly any eyebrows, I looked very very thin and he went, "We need to put Douglas in a campaign." So four days later, I was shooting a Burberry campaign because he had seen me looking crazy from the show so that was kind of funny.
Rivers are inherently interesting. They mold landscapes, create fertile deltas, provide trade routes, a source for food and water; a place to wash and play; civilizations emerged next to rivers in China, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They sustain life and bring death and destruction. They are ferocious at times; gentle at times. They are placid and mean. They trigger conflict and delineate boundaries. Rivers are the stuff of metaphor and fable, painting and poetry. Rivers unite and divide - a thread that runs from source to exhausted release.
When I was about 17, I didn't speak. English was like a foreign language. I'd just grunt. The only time I talked was when I said my lines on set. I didn't speak to any of the actors or anything. Then one day Alison from the Corrie press office started talking to me in the green room and I just decided to talk back. She ran upstairs to tell everyone that she'd just had a 10-minute conversation with me like it was the most unbelievable thing in the world. I just woke up one day and thought, 'I'm going to talk today'. I've really made up for lost time since.
I'm socially awkward. What draws me to playing socially awkward characters? I think they're interesting. I'm fascinated kind of by - I mean, I know I'm sure I've got my own social awkwardness but I'm kind of fascinated by that and I lived, probably, I attribute it - I lived in New York for a long time, road the subways, saw a lot of awkwardness, but they're just interesting. They're not cookie cutter. They're usually very colorful characters. They see things different ways and, I don't know, its just a kind of - just a kind of life that interesting to me.
When you're working on a creative thing, everyone has an idea, and they're pushing it. The first time you work with anybody, you have to get comfortable with the way another person pushes hard for what they want. Familiarity breeds contempt, people say. But I've found, for creative things, familiarity breeds peace of mind, because you realize you know someone better. You trust each other. You know not to take things a certain way, or a wrong way. You get to where you don't have to waste quite so much time with diplomacy. Things are a little more efficient.
I remember watching Meryl Streep in, The River Wild. There's this scene where she's has a gun pointed at her, it's absurd in a lot of ways. Someone pulls a gun on her I think, I'm not really fully aware of the scene and she just, she starts, you see her terrified. And then all of a sudden she starts to burst out laughing. She starts laughing. Like she can't stop laughing. Because she's terrified and she's emotional and there are no rules to what you're supposed to feel. That to me is like A number one, that's the thing I have to remind myself all the time.
I'm still in the middle of the transition. I'm still in man-boy mode. And that won't go away for a while. But it's a fun time to be in, because it's very rare that people get to work through this time. It's rare to see a John Cusack in Say Anything. It's rare that you'd find an actor right in the cusp of the child-to adult transition, just got through puberty, just getting into a different way of life. There's few movies like that, and few roles like that, so it's going to be tough to pick and choose. I guess the goal is good people, work with good people.
The biggest thing about me, as an actor, is I'm never a finished product, you know? I always want to try something or be in a new genre because, one, it's much more fun to do that because you're not doing the same thing over and over. One of the greatest reasons is that it keeps stretching you as an actor. So, hopefully, my method is that it makes me a better actor, and a more believable actor, so then, the more experience I have in any way possible, in a drama or a musical genre, different formats of working, the better I can be on all different platforms.
And even if we win, if we win, HAH! Even if we win! Even if we play so far above our heads that our noses bleed for a week to ten days; even if God in Heaven above comes down and points his hand at our side of the field; even if every man woman and child held hands together and prayed for us to win, it just wouldn't matter because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Mohawk because they've got all the money! It just doesn't matter if we win or we lose. IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER! It just doesn't matter! It just doesn't matter!
I was very curious about the world even at a young age, and I don't know at what point I became aware that other cultures believed in different religions, and my question was, 'Well, why don't they get to go to heaven then?' And the answer was always, 'Well, everyone gets a chance - meaning at the word of God as it was described to me then. And that didn't sit well with me then. But in times of trouble or discord, it's a great comfort. And it wasn't till I left home that I really came to the conclusion that it didn't make sense to me for many other reasons.
It wasn't like this happy-go-lucky experience, shooting Norman movie. It was something I kind of had to, sort of dedicate a certain level of focus and energy to kind of just stay in this headspace that would allow me to access - because it's also a very emotional movie at times. This was the first time I ever played a real character, a fully fleshed out, dimensionalized, multi-faceted character, as opposed to a part. There's not very much opportunity for somebody of my age and my look, so for a character-driven piece like this to come along is a rare thing.
You're always going to have ups and downs - if you look at the careers of a whole bunch of people I respect, some of them have good movies, some of them have bad movies. I remember Andrew Garfield said that the only power we really have as actors - or one of the main powers we have as actors - is our choices. We can make interesting choices, but as soon as you've made that choice, so much else is in play: the director, the script can change, the other actors. All you can do is try to make interesting choices and, once you're in it, just do the best you can.
I've always thought of characters like advent calendars. You have Christmas and you have all the little doors over the windows and every day you're allowed to open one more as it gets towards Christmas and you see more and more about what's inside that house.I remember as a kid being fascinated by that and I've always thought of my character as a little bit like that. I like to have secrets and slowly let those secrets out to the audience, sometimes never let them out, but let them see as you open the shutters, open and see a little bit more of a character.
It's all about respect; he's looking for respect from his buddies. In the last one he just wanted to hang out, to be part of the group, but this time he wants more from his friends. And without giving the story away, he finally gets something that he has been looking for when the mini sloths kidnap him and take him to their tribal area. He gets to be the Fire King and they worship him and there is an amazing scene with a "call and response" sequence in the style of Cab Callow [the legendary American jazz singer and band leader] between him and his audience.
I think that for a lot of actors - especially American actors - to get line readings and to be told and have your director literally act out the part for you is sort of discouraging in a way. It's a very Eastern European thing to do - a lot of directors that I worked with in Russia did that as well. And, I never took that as an insult, as many actors tend to do. To me, I think it's just offering a certain energy - offering their flavor - and, instead of trying to sort of decode and communicate it to you, they just show you their flavor of what it should be.
I try to discover the character's primary motivation. In a screenplay, you can make up a hundred different variables of a character. Is he there for love or respect, or is he there out of fear? What's he doing? Why is he doing it? Then I can build on the intricacies. Does he pick his fingernails? Does he always do this when he's lying? All the little things that come with it. But it's also like, if you're doing a caricature and you're like, "I want to do a blue-collar guy from Jersey," you have to go and do the research on the region, the who, what and why.
Internationally and in foreign markets, movies starring women don't make as much money as movies starring men. And then you can blame filmmakers, especially in comedy, which is my bread and butter, because it's become a bit of a boys' club over the years. With the boys in charge you get these takes on women which are either the girlfriend or the mean wife or the girl who appears in a romantic comedy. You're just getting either men's fantasies about women or what they think is the reality about women instead of men just having a healthy attitude about women.