Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The experience on that movie (Dead Poets Society) was, for lack of a better term, life-altering. Peter Weir has a unique talent for making movies that are intelligent but also mainstream. I've never been terribly successful at doing that.
My goal is to tell good stories. And to try as best I can to do something new with acting. To learn from the past and to be a relevant artist. To make stories that are interesting and contemporary and to tell some kind of emotional truth.
I wouldn't trade anything for family time. To me, it is more important than everything else, and I have a very deep-rooted belief in it, which is influenced by my Jewish faith. That's a very great source of who I am and what I believe in.
The soap opera was so long ago - the thing about soap operas, and there's something to be said for doing it, but you do a script a day. I don't want to say it's a training ground; it really isn't, but what it does teach you is discipline.
The difference that a drama group or a cinema club can make to a small village or a town. It opens people up to ideas, potential about themselves that really, in a way, education often fails to. It's a way of drawing a community together.
The only description for Nolan in the script was that he's a very bad dresser. I put on a red windbreaker and every other ugly, ill-fitting thing I could dig out. He was potentially written as a clean-cut nerd, but I wanted a darker spin.
Asthma doesn't affect me, even though I have it. It can seem like it wants to act up a little if I'm nervous before going on stage, but that's natural to many performers. If I think it's going to be a problem, I just reach for my inhaler.
I feel very blessed in my career to have been able to bounce back and forth between different things, television and film, comedies and some dramas, but I am, um, as long as the script inspires me and there good people, that's it. I'm in.
I don't look at things goin', 'Oh, is this gonna make me rich? Is this gonna make me a star? Am I gonna win awards?' If all that stuff happens, great. Who cares? I still have to wake up in the morning and go to work and be happy to do it.
I certainly direct with confidence even if I'm not confident. I learned early on as an actor that confidence can be faked, and it's not always a terrible thing to do. A lot of times if people feel you're confident, then they're confident.
I had the good fortune of speaking with Orson Wells many decades ago and he said 'Success is primarily luck anyway.' And I have been very lucky. Of course, Orson Wells was enormously talented and brilliant - so who am I to argue with him!
Those Tea Party people are crazy. I mean, they're lunatics. They close down the government, throw people out of their jobs - hundreds of thousands of people - and they say that they're doing it ultimately in the interest of creating jobs.
You look for the roles where, when you read it, you're just like, "Yes, I know that. I know that feeling. I know what it means to feel like that. I know this person." When you have a soulful connection to a part, that's a dream come true.
Choosing work is an interesting thing. It's a balance between what's available and what you've always got in the back of your mind - that awful, strange thing that seems to have to exist in this industry, of what will give you "exposure."
Lobbyists in Washington are making six figure salaries selling our government out to the corporate interests and we just sit and smile as if nothing is happening while the poor folks are getting poorer and their pharmaceutical bills rise.
With both Caddyshack and Vacation, it's not like the subjects were serious enough that they engaged my interest for another round. I love the characters, and the actors were great, but I didn't see the need to make another Vacation movie.
Sixty percent of the vegetables you see in the supermarkets came from the American Indians. They also gave us aspirin and quinine. And their model of government parallels our Senate. But their women elected the chiefs, and impeached them.
The void, the concept of nothingness, is terrifying to most people on the planet. And I get anxiety attacks myself. I know the fear of that void. You have to learn to die before you die. You give up, surrender to the void, to nothingness.
Between takes I find it difficult to switch off and then try and re-emerge myself in the part, so I try to stay in that frame of mine all day. It can be exhausting and you lose a sense of self, but it is the method that works best for me.
Humility was considered a great virtue in my family household. No show of complacency or self-satisfaction was ever tolerated. Patting yourself on the back was definitely not encouraged, and pleasure or pride would be punishable by death.
My dad was a football player - a soccer player - for Manchester United, and I loved playing football, but I also happened to be the guy in class who was pretty good at sight reading. My teacher gave me scripts, and I was very comfortable.
I dont have a place that I call home at the moment because theres no point. I mean, Im a traveling circus for a while. Its weird. Like, if I wanted to go home, theres nowhere to go. I just go to a hotel. But Ive kind of gotten used to it.
Stargazing is one of the most profoundly human things one can do. But perhaps we must more frequently tear ourselves away from the mystery and beauty of the starry heavens above, and rather inspect, admire and foster the moral law within.
One of the best things about humans is we recognize patterns, so we get things like science, music, philosophy. One of the worst things is that we see patterns that are not there so we get things like racism, homophobia and Jerry Falwell.
I think you've really got to cling to what makes sense to you. Obviously, I'm not a serial murderer in my real life, so that's where you have to delve into and do all the research. But, you have to find something likable in the character.
I know because the movie's made a lot of money, everyone's relaxed a bit so there wasn't that pressure to set the tone for the movies [Fifty Shades of Grey] so I felt a little more freedom this time and it probably made it more enjoyable.
If I'm in the studio, I'm completely on music. I try to go to that place and that's the toughest thing for me to do. When I'm with other musicians, sometimes I go back to, almost like, childhood, because that's what I always wanted to be.
I feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, which is both settling and terrifying. The roller coaster is going, and there is no jumping off at this point unless I just go nuclear. It's a really interesting part of the whole journey.
I wonder why there is a designated hitter in baseball after all these years? As an experiment, it seemed like a swell enough idea, but you would think the novelty would have worn off by now and everyone would get back to playing baseball.
If it's a romantic holiday, the only thing I need is my wife. We love quiet and calm places where we can't be disturbed. Neither of us likes being in busy places; we would much rather stay in our hotel room and enjoy each other's company.
You have a great road map when you play somebody that exists. That's the amazing thing. But then you have great limitations from that road map. It's hard to deviate from it creatively as an actor. It's like, "Oh wait, he'd never do that."
In the case of 'Ice,' in the beginning when I got the script, felt like a show that was searching for what it is, and what they knew or what felt palpable to me was that this character, Freddy Green, was going to have the biggest journey.
I know it sounds very typical to say, but the best part of being an actor, and the reason why I think a lot of actors do it, is that it's always changing. You get to play so many things that it's like you've had so many different careers.
[As an actor] you're looking to crawl into an anonymous fictional person's skin, but then you have the ironic obligation to promoting the movie in such a public way that it almost undermines the initial intention of going under the radar.
I remember when I was doing The Crucible on Broadway with Laura Linney, and Arthur Miller had been in rehearsal with us and was on stage on opening night. She turned to me during the curtain call and said, Lets make sure we remember this.
I wanted to just be a filmmaker, and I thought I wanted to do all the aspects, and it seemed like as a producer was the best way to do it, because I could have... You never have control on a movie, but you have as much control as you can.
I can't get used to the fact that I'm 68 years old. I still feel like a youngster. I am playing a part even older than 68 - 71 years old. It's kind of startling to see myself in a movie and realize, "Yup. That's exactly what I look like."
With acting it's your neck up there in the end. And if you think the director can't help you it's one thing. But if you feel they're reining you in when they need to be giving you some rope, or vice versa, then I just don't tolerate that.
France, and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.
The world keeps moving, the world keeps turning, and people get older, and young people become older and more important and cooler and interesting, and actually staying the same becomes a liability, especially in the advertising industry.
There's something melancholy about professors because they're chronically abandoned. They form these lovely relationships with students and then the students leave and the professors stay the same. It's like they're chronically abandoned.
Everybody said, You hit it so big when you were on Ally McBeal. I didnt do anything for a year after Ally McBeal, and I had to write David Kelley to get myself back on Ally a second time because I thought the character should be on again.
I've turned down a lot of stuff. I've read several scripts and said "That's not me, I'm not interested in doing that." It's got to be something that inspires me and captures my imagination. I want to be able to say "There's a challenge.".
The records - what little we know about Shakespeare, including the records of the plays in his playhouse - were often the story of how quickly they came off if they didn't work. They had to move on. They were absolutely led by box office.
I saw Derek Jacobi play Hamlet when I was 17, and he directed me as Hamlet when I was 27, and I directed him as Claudius in 'Hamlet' when I was 35, and I'm hoping we meet again in some other production of Hamlet before we both toddle off.
If you look at films about becoming a man, coming-of-age movies are made with 12-, 16-, 40-, 50-year-olds... For a guy to feel like hes a 100 percent grown-up is almost like giving up. Like admitting that youre on your way into the grave.
I don't feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances, but they wouldn't do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.
I don't look at obstacles as obstacles. I look at them as things that were put there for a reason. You can approach these things negatively or positively. I think those that approach it with a negative mindset only get a negative outcome.
I'm not out there trying to get press for myself nor am I trying to convince anybody that I'm living any kind of a life. I'm actually trying to convince people: I don't want you to know what I'm living, because it's none of your business.
Dementia is often regarded as an embarrassing condition that should be hushed up and not spoken about. But I feel passionately that more needs to be done to raise awareness, which is why I became an ambassador for the Alzheimer's Society.