Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've always said that, growing up in postwar Japan, I never felt any connection to my work through those experiences. The work I do really comes from inside myself. For me, being born in Japan was an accident.
I get myself a gig somewhere, whether it's in a club, whether it's in a bar, it doesn't matter, and I just work on New Year's Eve because I always feel it's very symbolic for me for the next year, for the new year.
To be honest, more than what I prepare, it's the directors who do the bulk of the work, researching, collecting data and all that. I like to see myself as a processor: they feed me with the data, I give the output.
That's what I'm always searching for - finding the balance between not caring so much to where I put all this pressure on myself. But still caring enough to where it pushes me to work exactly how I've been working so far.
I call myself a feminist, not a feminist filmmaker. If somebody asked me if I had a feminist sensibility it would be pretty hard to deny, but is it the theme of my work? Not necessarily. I'm interested in a lot of things.
I kind of had to figure stuff out on my own and get myself snowboarding competitively again. I went through all types of different legs to try to learn which were going to work for me. Luckily, I was able to figure it out.
I do occasionally get into that 'checking Twitter every five minutes' state - 'Please, help me avoid my work.' I have a writing room for when I get completely out of control, so I can put myself out of the Internet's reach.
I took 'Grease' to play my trump card, my voice, and get attention that would lead to auditions for serious work like 'Angels in America.' But I backed myself into a corner with 'Grease,' and it took me 17 years to get out.
It never ceases to surprise me, the people I get to work with. I'm in a French film with Sandrine Bonnaire? I adore Sandrine Bonnaire. I'm doing a picture for Robert Redford? The Sundance Kid? I have to pinch myself sometimes.
When I speak to people I worked with when I was young, they constantly tell me they wish their students would work half as hard as I did. I was always one to get a lot more out of myself, seeing the glass as half-empty rather than half-full.
I'd been kind of a hiccup in my parents' lives. They lost track of me and I didn't know what I was going to do with myself. And then fate reached in and took me in its hands. I was discovered right out of high school and started getting work.
In the neighborhood where my studio is, in South Central Los Angeles, there are a lot of immigrant-owned businesses. I'm constantly amazed at the level of work they do. It's above anything. For me, I think I pattern myself on that work ethic.
I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted 'Tsotsi,' so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.
My office doubles as a karaoke den for the neighborhood. There are strobe lights and Rock Band plastic guitars, a disco ball and a fog machine and some other things. I have a really long work day, and you might find me doing karaoke by myself late at night.
I respected it. I submerged myself into it. So on a lot of days off I would go and fish with the fishermen and the families that ran the boats. I would go work the fields with farmers. I would go and talk with farmers about growing particular products for me.
I like finding stuff that I suck at and trying to get better. So I'm taking classes, getting myself comfortable in an acting scene. You've got to work out those ticks. For instance, standing up used to be really hard for me. I act much better if I'm sitting down.
In my first few years as an actor, I took one terrible TV job after another. But even as I laughed off my awful roles and made fun of myself to friends, my work made me cringe - I dreaded anyone's seeing it. I was crushed that I wasn't doing anything I was proud of.
Any person I idolise, or I really admire their work, I want to beat them... For me, going through my years, I made sure to idolise myself... So when you're in a race, you have to make sure that you think you are the favourite to win. You have to have that confidence.
A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.
Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
I think athletically I can be okay with any role, but I'm willing to go over and beyond for my work. My fan base is so strong and loyal, and they wanna see me evolve. I'm where I'm supposed to be and I want to challenge myself with the people that are doing it real big.
I was low-key abusing myself. The idea of being skinny became something that was most appealing to me. Even if you watch 'The Real,' from season 1 to season 4, I was always 100 lbs. I started to really work hard to stay petite and to not gain weight and to stay sample size.
I don't consider myself a competition to anyone. There is ample space for everyone here. When there are directors who create characters for me, why should I feel bothered or insecure? When it comes to updating myself, I work very hard to relate to the emotions of characters I play.
I used to be pretty hard on myself, like, if I didn't like a haircut I did on someone, I would think about it a lot and second-guess myself. But after therapy and a lot of work, I know how to dust myself off a lot faster, and those things don't knock me down as much as they used to.
What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.
Back in 1985, I was working on my third solo album when the band came to me and asked me to produce the next Fleetwood Mac project. At that point, I put aside my solo work - which was half finished - and committed myself for the next seventeen months to producing 'Tango in the Night.'
When I crash during a race and injure myself, what's the point in whinging? Because I put myself in that position. No one's making me race motorbikes - I want to go and race motorbikes. The most annoying thing for me is lying in hospital and not being able to get to work. I get beside myself.
I decided to write a crime novel. That genre was at the height of its popularity in Poland, so I thought it might earn me a bit of cash to go on with my work on 'The Books of Jacob.' I shut myself away for a few months and devoted myself entirely to 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.'
My whole premise has been, right from the beginning, that it would take me a lifetime to learn to explain myself as an artist. As you grow older, you learn what to do and what to leave out. You kind of simplify your work and get the same thing done with fewer strokes. It's pretty interesting to me.
I work with the options I have in front of me and my reasons for choosing a job can vary enormously depending on the circumstances. Sometimes I take a job because it's a group of people I'm dying to work with, and sometimes it can be a desire to shake things up a bit and not to take myself too seriously.
I hired a publicist once I got cast in 'Passing Strange,' and one of the first conversations we had was about how I wanted to handle talking about my sexuality. I said, 'It's never been an issue for me. I want to talk about my work, but if something about myself relates to my work, of course I'll talk about it.'
I don't get the jitters and I don't get nervous, because I build that comfort on set for myself. Sometimes if I'm gonna do something really crazy, it helps me to yell or look like an idiot on set, so that when I'm about to do a scene, I've already embarrassed myself. I find ways to work around getting the jitters.
I could not see myself going back into the studio without Tommy Dowd, our beloved producer who passed away in 2002. Then in 2009, Michael Lehman, my manager, really pushed me to meet with T Bone Burnett. I ended up meeting with T Bone in Memphis, and we hit it off right away; I knew he was a guy I could work with.