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I turned down a scholarship to Yale. The problem with college is that there's a tendency to mistake preparation for productivity. You can prepare all you want, but if you never roll the dice you'll never be successful.
I didn't know my dad for a long time. My dad was on drugs and my dad was at the VA Hospital, my dad was off in his own world selling drugs or using them or there would be crack heads in the house or whatever it would be.
If people perceive you as a good actor then they'll wish for you to be a good actor and they'll root for you when they watch you, but if you come out and you're going to clubs every night people don't root for you anymore.
There's a way to do an acid trip like Harold & Kumar, and there's a way to be on acid. What I know of acting, Sean Penn actually strapped up to that electric chair in Dead Man Walking. These are the guys that I look up to.
The big thing for actors is the level of commitment. So, if you know something's already happened, there's not a whole lot of whys and hows that go down. You just innately commit 'cause it happened. It does help with commitment.
So it's kind of nervous to be in this situation, but at the same time you look at all those actors and the work that they've done, I've been in bigger films than all of them and still kept my integrity and still kept my respect.
I don't even really know what it is I do for a living - the level of insecurity is very, very high. You're making a lot of money, getting a lot of accolades and positive criticism for something where you don't even know what you're doing.
My generation will actually be the first generation that is tamer than the one that came before it, and it will probably be poorer; less fun and less money. It's ridiculous. In my parents' generation, rebellion was pop culture. It's not anymore.
I was always raised on cowboy films, and then when I could start making choices about the movies I wanted to watch I found myself wanting to watch gangster films which were slightly more sophisticated than the baseline stuff that was in westerns.
Look, you're on the set for six months, with someone who's rooting to be attracted to you, and you're rooting to be attracted to them. I never understood the separation of work and life in that situation. But the time I spent with Megan was our own thing.
My neighborhood was rough, but I live a great life now. I don't fight that much now. I don't look for it anyway, but if someone hits your mother, whether you're a star, an accountant, or an astronaut or anything... I mean it's your mother, so I lost my mind.
You can't have bank holding companies acting as hedge funds. You can't have them taking a million-dollar pension plan for Joe Schmo the bus driver and treat it with the same risk appetite that you treat George Soros' pocket money. It's fundamentally ridiculous.
I became a Christian man in a very real way. I could have just said the prayers that were on the page, but it was a real thing that really saved me. And you can't identify unless you're really going through it. It's a full-blown exchange of heart, a surrender of control.
And if you're a golfer and you watch a golf film and Matt Damon swing, and it's not great, then you're not going to believe in the golf story, you're not going to believe in the rest of the film. That's the whole movie, so if that swing looks like crap, the movie's crap.
Now my dad is with me, traveling with me and a big part of this whole thing is I like to mix it up a little bit, you know. Who gets to take their father on a private jet across the country and stay in first class hotels? So we're enjoying it, but I'd stop if it's not possible.
I'm not an Adonis, that's for damn sure. I've never really thought of myself that way, and it doesn't matter to me. My favorite actors aren't Adonises. Dustin Hoffman is a flawed-looking man; he's amazing to me. Tom Hanks is flawed-looking; people love him. Same with Gene Hackman.
My first car, I got it in an auction at my temple. It was an '86 Volvo that I got for 500 bucks, and then wound up throwing $10,000 into the stereo system and put TVs in the foot rests. It was the most ridiculous Volvo you'd ever seen, but I had never had money before and I was out of my mind.
Talent is to actors what luck is to card players. Its not really anything; its just a fictitious word that people have created and labeled things. Talent is like, you know, I never really believed in talent, I believed in drive and determination and preparation, but talent is sort of like luck.
I've learned to be more reserved, watch what I'm saying; I got in a little bit of trouble. People tell me 'Never lose that, never lose that,' but then I get in trouble so I have to lose it. I'm trying to keep a little bit; I'm never going to lose who I am, I just gotta tone it down a little bit.
There is no grand strategy. My sensibilities push me in a certain direction. Other actors have different sensibilities. That's all. I think it really is that simple. There's no grand strategy. There are so many variables that I have no control over. I sign on to movies I want to watch, as a fan.
Talent is to actors what luck is to card players. It's not really anything; it's just a fictitious word that people have created and labeled things. Talent is like, you know, I never really believed in talent, I believed in drive and determination and preparation, but talent is sort of like luck.
There's no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist. You give Terrence Malick a movie like Transformers, and he's f***ed. There's no way for him to exist in that world... Lars Von Trier's dangerous. He scares me. And I'm only going to work now when I'm terrified.
Having emotional connections to things that don't really exist, like looking at a green ball and really loving that green ball, and being sad whether it's around or not. Stuff like that. I've never done acting at this level before so it was a huge challenge for me. It was a hurdle to overcome just to survive.
People think that their vote counts. They go to college, and everything gets mixed up. People stop caring, ... They raise the gas prices, but what the Everyman makes and welfare never seem to keep up. The HMO system is so ridiculous. I'm slightly educated. No one wants to hear what Hilary Duff thinks of the economy.
If you asked an 18-year-old what they want to do with their life, and the options are 'Transformers' or Lars von Trier, he's probably shipping out for 'Transformers.' If you ask a 26-year-old what he wants to do, 'Transformers' or Lars von Trier, he'd probably pick Lars von Trier. So, my sensibilities are changing as I change.
If you're trying to learn how to act from a class, you're analyzing the teachers' movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that's wrong. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin. It's your own imagination, and your own version of it.
I was doing stand up comedy when I was 11, that's how I got started; not because I wanted to do comedy, but because we were broke, living in Echo Park in Downtown Los Angeles, from 1986, I saw the Rodney King riots; my parents didn't really work. But I wanted a new backpack, that's how I got into this business - I wanted a new backpack.
Child actors become types. The cutesy type, the funny type, the dark type. Any time you're a type, your career's over. It's not been effortless for me; I've had bumps in the road, you know? I was in Dumb And Dumberer. It's not been a flawless thing so far. But all in all, I'm proud of it. Most proud of it because of the diversity. Because the genres are different.
It's fun right now, and I love it right now, but I don't know where I'm going to be tomorrow, 'cause I'm not psychic. But I know that over the last 10 years, acting has been the only joy, this has been - it's strange to say, 'cause the thinking is off. But this is more important than my hobbies, my family, my love, my friends. It's the most important thing in the world to me.
Never wanted to do anything else than acting ever in my life. But I'm 20, and there's so many possibilities. It would be insane for me to say, "Yeah this is definitely it, I'm never doing anything else." I'm 20 years old. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know anything about life. So I don't know. I may be a train conductor in 10 years. I have no idea. And that's the joy of this all.
Sometimes perception is almost more important than the skill level of an actor. And if you give too much away, you have nothing to take for yourself and put onscreen. If people feel like they know you too well, they won't be able to indentify with the character you're trying to portray. Or they'll feel that you're just playing yourself, and then you just become a personality actor. And that's the death of any actor.
Oh yeah, I'm the president of the lucky club. There are so many talented people who don't work. And the crop of young actors I'm surrounded by is incredible. When you have people like that around you it amps you up a little bit. Also, Emile Hirsch and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or guys like Ryan Gosling. It's a really good crowd and I feel I'm coming up at a good time. But equally, there's a lot of good young actors who don't get to work who are more talented than I. I'm just lucky.
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.