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His scowl returned. "Why, if they're supposed to be Greek, are all of them speaking with an English accent?" She laughed. "Didn't you know that British is, like, the universal 'foreign' language in Hollywood? They use it in any movie where they want to have a foreign feel to it, regardless of where it's set
I married a Florentine. We bought a house, had a family, and after a decade in our little Hollywood nest, we said, 'Let's go to Tuscany.' Tell God you can't make him laugh, but the next thing I know, my cooking show has become a hit, and they're asking for more seasons, and they want it to be in the States.
Imagine if Lin-Manuel Miranda had tried to do 'Hamilton' first in Hollywood. They would have told him, 'The forefathers weren't Latino or black. They didn't speak in hip hop.' That would never had gotten going in Hollywood ever. But theater let Lin-Manuel him do it, and he created an incredible masterpiece.
'Zero Dark Thirty' is a great piece of filmmaking and does a valuable public service by raising difficult questions most Hollywood movies shy away from, but as of this writing, it seems that one of its central themes - that torture was instrumental to tracking down bin Laden - is not supported by the facts.
When you see the violence of Hollywood movies, there is a tendency that the hero is combating and confronting many people, without much harm to himself. But in my films, the hero takes a lot of hits so the very act of the hero being the one on the receiving end, makes the audience cheer and connect with him.
For us it's always about making sure that there's substance, that things are well thought out, they're real, they're going to happen versus just haphazardly making Hollywood type announcements. So that's where we are there [on Comic-Con], just making sure that when we do something to say that it's something.
It's funny: I've always had the analogy of a snow globe, that Hollywood is a snow globe. No, it's true. If you shake it up, you can look at it and really enjoy it. But don't ever go in. Don't ever buy into it and be like, 'I deserve all of this!' because it can go away at any time, so just have a lot of fun.
As a woman who doesn't necessarily fit the beauty standard in Hollywood... I really related to the narrative of looking for something you felt comfortable in that would properly express your identity, especially when your identity didn't feel like it necessarily matched the one that was being imposed on you.
If you take the '70s with Blaxploitation pictures, there was a proliferation of black-content films and motion pictures, television, stage plays and so forth at a time when Hollywood was in trouble financially, and it was cheaper to do black films to keep the lights on until they could reestablish themselves.
People ask me about 'The Hurt Locker' a lot, and it's an incredible piece of filmmaking - as are 'Band of Brothers' and 'Platoon' and 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Apocalypse Now.' But they're not necessarily true to war in a literal sense. What they are, really, are brilliant movies about Hollywood's idea of war.
Audiences like to be made to feel that there is a world where things go right: where big emotions can happen and yet feel safe. This is why there is a constant tension in Hollywood between studios who want happy endings and writers who want to explore the human condition. There is a time and a place for both!
I grew up looking at... going to the movies a lot, as much as they'd let you. I grew up in Manchester in the north of England in the '40s and '50s. I saw a lot of movies. They were all Hollywood and British movies. I didn't see a film that wasn't in English until I was 17 when I went to London to be a student.
I went to drama school in England, and you spend your first year working on the muscles surrounding the vocal mechanisms. You learn how you support it and create characters through your voice so that became an obsession. So I went to Hollywood thinking, 'Oh, I'm going to be one of the great voice-over artists.'
I thought that the fashion world could be a bit fake sometimes, but it's nothing compared to Hollywood. These girls would walk over their grandmothers' graves to get a part, and the producers talk about actresses like they're dirt, picking over every part of them so that they end up paranoid and having surgery.
The traditional Hollywood system is pretty rigid, but the film scene in, say, South Africa is booming with a lot of possibilities. If you have the cameras and reasonable capital, you can put your film in theatres next to 'Guardians of the Galaxy.' A great example of that was Kagiso Lediga's film 'Blitz Patrole.'
Before sequels became the most reliable way to make a buck, Bond set the standard for lavish serial adventures. Before Hollywood found gold in multimillion-dollar adaptations of comic-book characters - in the Superman, Batman and Spider-Man blockbusters - Bond was the movies' first big-budget franchise superhero.
I love the pictures of Old Hollywood, seeing the directors dressed in suits and ties. Even the grips would be wearing ties. But the biggest thing is when I was a kid, I couldn't wait to be an adult, and I think what happens with most guys is that no one wants to be an adult anymore. So they're dressing like kids.
Even in Haiti, I saw John Wayne movies. American cinema has always been the dominant cinema throughout the world, and people tend to forget that. People aren't just seeing these films in California or Florida. They're seeing them in Haiti, in Congo, in France, in Italy and in Asia. That is the power of Hollywood.
You can count on one hand the white rappers that have made it. So I just wanted to show the point of view of an actor in Hollywood, because what could be more soft than that. Rapping about auditions and acting and stuff. I thought it was just uncharted territory to clown on, so that pushed through with Dirt Nasty.
You can't put the Hollywood sign in a movie without paying them. That is a landmark in L.A. I'm sorry, remove it from our skyline, then. You know? How dare they. That should be public domain, right? But it's privately owned, and they enforce that. They sue people. If you see it in the movie, they've paid for that.
Fashion gave me the platform that has made this transition from fashion to Hollywood, from East Coast to West Coast. Fashion gave me the platform that has made this easier than it is for a lot of other people. And I will always count fashion as the industry that was first to welcome me and embrace what I could do.
I grew up in a house where my father went on auditions, and he got some and he lost some, and there were good years and lean years. I didn't expect anything from the business, and that's often a danger in Hollywood, the notion that if you're pretty and have white teeth and just show up for the game then you'll win.
I think women have always been funny. But when Tina Fey became head writer at 'Saturday Night Live,' the culture shifted, and women gained a bigger voice in comedy. It's not as if Hollywood producers are feminists. It's more that Hollywood said, ''Bridesmaids' made us so much money, all we want now is funny women.'
Why did Erich von Stronheim leave Germany? Why did Hitchcock leave England? If you were a director you'd like to work in Hollywood too. Now go ahead and ask me if I'm still Polish. You people keep asking me this question. You want Polish artists to make it in the world, but when they do, you accuse them of treason.
I was really fortunate from the time I arrived in Hollywood to work with some of the greatest directors from the beginning. I worked with Robert Altman, John Boorman, and of course Steven Spielberg, Michael Cimino, Brian De Palma ... I couldn't pick one of them; they were all different, but they are all so talented.
The days when the words 'Hollywood actor' framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics - candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike - is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.
They are going to be playing Shaggy and Scooby-Doo for eons and eons, and they're going to forget Casey Kasem - unless they happen to step on his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I'll be one of those guys people say, 'Who's that?' about. And someone else will say, 'He's just some guy who used to be on the radio.'
There is no blacklist. In the first place, in the entertainment business, money talks, bullshit walks. So Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins won't be blacklisted because they are bankable stars. In the second place, if you are a woman, the only things you're going to be blacklisted for in Hollywood are body fat and aging.
The concept of even having fans is still kind of weird to me. I really just feel like a filmmaker that is only just finding my foot in and is beginning to participate in Hollywood and making films. So the idea of any kind of fandom or people that are waiting for something that I may release is very distant in my mind.
For a good workout, I go to At One Fitness in North Hollywood, where my trainer, Jon Allsop, puts me through it all. I like it because it's a small gym and I've known the people for a long time. Jon will have me do cross-training where I'll lift weights, jump rope, throw around a medicine ball and I never get to stop.
Just because of the #MeToo movement in Hollywood, after Oscar-winning actresses including Angelina Jolie came out and spoke against Harvey Weinstein, we also want to talk about something that has been happening in Bollywood for long; like several years ago, Mamta Kulkarni had spoken against filmmaker Rajkumar Santoshi.
The endless teen franchises that come out of Hollywood... more often than not, the central character doesn't have any discernible character traits. They're just the young, good-looking guy who goes on this journey. They're always played by fantastic young actors, but ultimately, they're not very interesting characters.
When you audition for shows in Hollywood, you go in, you do your scene, maybe you get an adjustment. It's sort of easy, and a lot of times it just feels sort of rote and simple. Whereas when you go to New York and you audition for plays, you walk out sweaty and intimidated and nervous and doubting yourself as an actor.
When I was very young and first worked in Hollywood, the films had bred in me one sole ambition: to get away from them; to live inthe great world outside movies; to meet people who created their own situations through living them; who ad-libbed their own dialogue; whose jokes were not the contrivance of some gag writer.
My father and Mary Pickford were the reigning stars of not just Hollywood but of the world. Well, to bear my father's name was hard enough, but to work in pictures to boot was pretty foolhardy. In fact, my father was totally against it. He thought I should be off getting a good education and go into some safe profession.
The trouble with Hollywood is that too many of the top people responsible for pictures are too comfortable and don't give a damn about what goes up on the screen so long as it gets by at the box office. How can you expect people with that kind of attitude to make the kind of great pictures that the world will want to see?
How do you know Hollywood is getting serious about video games? They want to make one of their own. In 'Defiance,' the remaining humans on Earth, as well as alien species looking for a new home, find themselves settling for peace after a massive war desecrated the world and destroyed most of the alien ships along with it.
I think most Hollywood meetings are silly and I truly despise pitching. It's insane to expect someone to come in and tell you the story before they've written it, and buying an idea from someone who can explain it rather than write it is like choosing a mechanic based on his ability to draw a picture of your car's problem.
After 50 years in the motion picture business, I'm still learning my trade. This recent shoot of 'Mandie and the Secret Tunnel' was a revelation. The two young directors, Joy Chapman and Owen Smith, represent a group of actors, directors, and cinematographers all over the country that never show up in New York or Hollywood.
I think I'm drawn to more villain-type characters, because it's so cool to get to say all the things you want to say. In Hollywood, you get to this position where you have to bite your tongue so much. You take all your experiences of not being able to say what you really want to say, and channel that through your character.
I was 12 when I ordered my first guitar out of the worn and discolored pages of a Sears, Roebuck catalog. The story that I bought it on the installment plan is untrue, the invention of a Hollywood press agent. Local color. I paid cash, $8, money I had saved as a hired hand on my uncle Calvin's farm, baling and stacking hay.
I realized why I can cook for different environments. Because of everything I've gone through growing up. Why can I cook for a Hollywood event without blinking an eye? Because I cooked at the Beverly Hilton and because I moved to Villa Park. Why can I cook for kids on Hollywood Boulevard at night? Because I went through it.
Hollywood is a special place; a place filled with creative geniuses - actors, screenwriters, directors, sound engineers, computer graphics specialists, lighting experts and so on. Working together, great art happens. But in the end, all artists depend on diverse audiences who can enjoy, be inspired by and support their work.
There must be an alternative between Hollywood and New York, between those two places psychically as well as geographically. The University of Iowa tries to offer such a community, congenial to the young writer, with his uneasiness about writing as an honorable career, or with his excess of ego about calling himself a writer.
They go on about banning size zero, but I think Hollywood stars are the worst perpetrators. Most models are naturally long and gangly, while a lot of these young girls in Hollywood have gone on extreme diets. Their concave chests and bony arms are terrifying. It's scary to think that normal teenagers are tempted to copy them.
When I started coming to the U.S., they were offering me only the typical stereotypical roles: the druggard, the criminal, the gang member, or in the best-case scenario, the gardener or the cook. I was fed up with all these roles that were always the same. And I promised I would try to change the image of Latinos in Hollywood.
I never thought I was particularly good looking. But when I see old photographs, I realise that I was. I do wish I had known that at the time because beauty is power. I didn't realise how lucky I was to be young, beautiful and in Hollywood. It didn't hit me. Every day I woke up, went to the film studio and just got on with it.
After the Revolution in '49, all the films were propaganda. They serviced the government and carried the message that the government wants to relay to the people. But I think, in the last 10 years, because the film market is opening and there's an expansion of all the cinemas in China, it's now a lot like Hollywood productions.
The actors I was most impressed with and who were influencing my taste were all movie actors, so I always wanted to do movies but I didnt want to go to Hollywood and become a waiter in the meantime. The chances are really slim that an actor will be discovered in Hollywood. ... Ive never had to compromise myself for a job, ever.
Throughout the movies' golden age, the Western enriched Hollywood financially and artistically. But in the 1970s, the genre lost its audience appeal to fantasy films of the 'Star Wars' stripe, which told more or less the same story - elemental animosities leading to an armed showdown - but at a faster tempo, and in outer space.