Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The records that I like, they have life and warmth and soul in them. Like the slap back on Scotty Moore's guitar on 'Mystery Train.' You're not gonna get that in a computer. You're gonna want a live room, you're gonna wanna bounce the tape, you're gonna want real musicians, in a room, vibin' off of each other.
I've been on so many movies. Generally, I haven't gotten to be on the ground level. As of two years ago, in 'Dear John,' I got to really be on the ground floor. I wasn't a producer. I felt like I put the work in, and I did have a lot of sway on what got fixed, reshoots, so on and so forth. It felt really good.
I grew up playing the saxophone. I joined the jazz band in high school, but somewhere along the way I realized the guys who strummed acoustic guitars at parties were the ones who got the attention. So I asked a friend to show me a few chords, and when I moved to L.A. I spent a lot of time practicing my guitar.
The point is that when I see a sunset or a waterfall or something, for a split second it's so great, because for a little bit I'm out of my brain, and it's got nothing to do with me. I'm not trying to figure it out, you know what I mean? And I wonder if I can somehow find a way to maintain that mind stillness.
I had bedbugs in 2005. I felt like a leper. Worse than a leper. At least lepers had a colony they could go and live in with other people who empathized. I instead had friends stand up from tables and walk out of restaurants when I told them I had bedbugs, because they were afraid I'd transfer the bugs to them.
I enjoy dating. I love first dates. I think they're incredibly fascinating studies in human psychology. When you sit down across from someone on a first date and things are going alright, you talk objectives. We want to win each other over, so how do you win someone over? You have to put the best foot forward.
It's the obvious thing to say but artists want to be able to tell all kinds of stories and tear down every kind of wall, to look at ourselves and examine who we are and just get deeper insights into what makes us human beings. Anything that could possibly prevent that in our near future horrifies me to no end.
I have a list as long as my arm but I find those lists sort of self-defeating because you start to name and then after [the interviewer] leaves the room you go 'Ah, I forgot this person or that person.' So I just don't do it anymore. Hopefully if you make work that people like, they'll get in contact with you.
I suppose whenever you go through periods of transition, or in a way, it's a very definite closing of a certain chapter of your life. I suppose those times are always going to be both very upsetting and also very exciting by the very nature because things are changing and you don't know what's going to happen.
I think in many ways, I'm sort of a blank canvas, because in many ways, I'm just observing the world and the people around me and their characters and letting them kind of explode off me and to find out why they're doing what they're doing. But then every once in awhile, I get to take on a whole new character.
I remember seeing 'Aladdin' when I was five or six and loving it. I looked at the big screen and said to my mum, 'Whatever this Genie guy does, I want to do.' Mum said I couldn't be a genie, but that Robin Williams, who did the voice-over in the film, was an actor. So I said, 'OK, then, I want to be an actor.'
In so many roles I've played the outsider. As an outsider, you have more energy to succeed simply because you are an outsider. There are scripts floating around but they're not coming my way and I think that I am getting a little bit too old to play Napoleon. But if I was ever offered the role I would grab it.
As I say, there's something that scares the hell out of me but it really makes me work hard in losing myself. I'm not really interested in me as an actor or being a personality player, or a Hollywood star. What's given to me is to become different people and to find the truth of that. That is really what I do.
I think the biggest mistake - I was always a big fan of Cary Grant, and he asked me to do a movie with him, playing the second lead, and I didn't do it. And to this day, I can't remember why. But I could've said I worked with Cary Grant, but I turned him down. That was probably the biggest mistake I ever made.
If my subject is alive and is willing to talk to me, I will do it. But I always try to find people who were close, like lovers and family members and work colleagues - because we are what we think we are, but we're also the perception that others have of us. The truth is a sphere. There's always a hidden face.
Going to directing wasn't a reaction away from acting as much as it was a move towards something I always wanted to do. Ever since I was a kid, I was interested in the camera and how it worked and why one director would place it in this part of the room and then another would place it in that part of the room.
What did Bush do on 9/11? He ran away and hid. Even Reagan knew more about leadership than that, and he was as bad a symbol of America as I can think of, off-hand. But at least he's been in enough cowboy movies to know he had to come out and stand on top of the rubble and be seen shaking his fist or something.
I was entirely wrapped up in the idea of becoming an actor. I learned how to write on the job, basically out of necessity. I always thought it'd be fun to write something, but it never was an ambition of mine, per se. I just thought, "Well, maybe I'll do it one day just for the hell of it and see if it works."
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with this idea of opening a restaurant back in Indiana on a little pond. The guests would order their dinner and then take a little boat out with a colored flag on the front of it. When the matching color of the flag on their boat went up on a flag pole, their dinner was ready!
There is that awful moment when you realize that you're falling in love. That should be the most joyful moment, and actually it's not. It's always a moment that's full of fear because you know, as night follows day, the joy is going to rapidly be followed by some pain or other. All the angst of a relationship.
I am in a fabulously lucky position in that I get to wear beautiful, beautiful gowns for functions, which I can then give back. That way, they're not sitting in my wardrobe with me looking at them and feeling guilty. I love that, and I think when people have a fabulous function to go to, I'd recommend renting.
People are more open about seeking help these days. They recognise the fact that the alternative to having a shrink is that you bore your friends stupid. So I figured that I might as well give someone 100 bucks an hour to hear my woes. At least someone can make a living out of listening to my tedious problems.
I was too shy, I think, to sing publicly. It takes a particular kind of person. And when I was young, I was not that person. In the first instance, when a record company said to me, do you want to try and make your record, my first reaction was, no, I'm not worthy - I couldn't possibly, and so on and so forth.
As a child, my sister and I had very fruitful imaginations, and I would think that I wanted to be one profession or I'd want to have this experience in life. I realized it's not because I actually wanted to be a Coast Guard helicopter rescue pilot or something like that - I just enjoyed the idea of playing it.
Even when I went to America I didn't work for four years. It wasn't like I came to New York and it was the land of milk and honey. It was just as much of a hard graft. But there's a lot more opportunity nowadays across the board for actors, no matter what color you are, with the Internet and small productions.
Our generation, unfortunately, is stuck to our phones - and, like, Twitter - constantly, which I have no problem with. I'd say we're not describing the children of America or anything like that, but there is something to take from it: It is kind of sad how we can't go thirty minutes without checking our phone.
Some movies you fall a step behind, and some you stay in the same place, make the same choices. And then sometimes there are people who know more than you but show you, and that's the maximum you can hope for - doing that with someone who says, 'I like you for what you are, and I want you to be in my picture.'
These stunt guys are good at what they do and they're professional. A smart actor will step back and say, "I'm going to let the professionals do this." Hats off to those guys, man. When you see the credits scroll, look at all those stunt guys and remember all those names 'cause they earned their money on this.
Rather than, as an actor, I want the audience to like me, I'm going to smile beautifully and I've got everybody's sympathy - what about showing the moments when somebody is unbelievably petty? Or really selfish? The faults, the little things, those are the things that interested me about playing the character.
I get to work with incredibly talented young filmmakers and students, and their attitudes and relationship with film is still so pure. That re-inspires me and reminds me why I got into it and what I love about film, and allows me a little reprieve from the business side of it. And it rekindles my love of film.
I like playing sport, and I like doing physical stuff. I like hiking and I like climbing and I like playing sport. I do a lot. But I don't like the term 'exercising.' I feel like with sport, you're playing games. But with exercise, you're literally just trying to stop yourself from dying too young. It's weird.
I had just come off my third consecutive failed television series. I had sworn off doing TV for a while. I was going to go to New York, sublet an apartment, and find my soul again. Before I got on the plane, my agent sent me the script for 'Psych.' I read it on the plane and realised it had a lot of potential.
One of the reasons I moved away from painting was because I eventually discovered that I wanted to deal more with motion, time, and performance - and that became a much bigger part of my life both as an actor and as a musician and someone who goes on stage and travels around the world and works on productions.
I was on Stargate: Atlantis for four years, playing a similar character called Ronon, who was an alien that didn't say much and grunted. I've been there and done that. Whether people have seen it or not, you want to stretch. And then, while I waited, I got The Red Road, and I'd never gotten anything like that.
I love the feeling of having as close to a steady job as you can ever have as an actor. I'm not an extravagant spender, so when I work on a TV show for a season or do a bunch of episodes as a reoccurring, I try to spread the money that comes from that out so that I can do these movies that are important to me.
I know there are people, if I go into a market or a city for the first time, there are people that are there that just want to see the famous person, or the guy from 'Dumb and Dumber' or whatever movie they liked. And that's fine, it gets them in the door, but then it's my job to give them something different.
One of the things I'm always reminded of when I'm back on stage is how much you have to be aware of and in control of. There is no tight shot. There is no 'we're only shoulders-up this time.' No, from the top of your head to your pinky toe, you're telegraphing part of the story the entire time you're up there.
I don’t think there’s any such thing as male objectification…I think that word exists only with women because there are societal pressures for them to behave a certain way and to look a certain way. Someone put it to me once: Women are sex objects and men are success objects. That was really interesting to me.
People talk about the difference between working on stage and working on film. I think you could say that there are as many differences between working on low budget films and working on big budget films. You really are doing the same thing, but at the same time you're doing something vastly different as well.
In the first test screening of 'RoboCop,' it tested very high. Then they asked the people why they liked it, and the first answer was, 'I liked it because it was political.' And the second answer was because, 'It feels like it deals with current affairs.' And the third answer was, 'Because it feels emotional.'
I suppose I'm not quite the oldest detective on the block - David Jason is. When's he going to retire and give rest of us a chance?! No, his Touch Of Frost is terrific and a wonderful antidote to the po-faced detective shows around at the moment. Anyway, I can't retire. I have a wife and five chickens to feed.
My favorite part about working in theater is the rehearsal process. I absolutely love the rehearsal process. Working out the characters, figuring the character out, and the relationships between the different characters. I love all of that, which, unfortunately in film, you get very little opportunity to have.
I think that there's room for everyone. I don't think that if one person succeeds then another must fail. That's lunacy. I'm not sure what the reasons are for my philosophy, maybe it's the fact that if there are ten people doing the same job, we all know how we feel and what our high points and low points are.
Positive energy brings good feelings, and dark energy often means harm. But the destruction in dark energy is also a subtle aspect of construction, like how even forest fires have their benefits. Sometimes enemies are our best teachers, people can learn from their mistakes, destruction sometimes means rebirth.
Like every human we have to categorize ourselves, so you kind of start to build a mythos 'cause I had no information about [ biological mother]. So you have to build a mythos around yourself. And so my mythos included me not being wanted or me being a wretched person, which is just great fertilizer for comedy.
For so long, companies were run using a command-and-control, 'top down' hierarchical method that involved dictating down the command chain and maintaining order. What I've witnessed in our time is evolving democratization, a shift to a demand economy accelerated by technological advancements like social media.
In TV, kid roles are like this: You're either in a couple minutes of an episode playing somebody's kid, or you get in these procedurals where you're crying or you're playing a witness or you're playing a crazy person. Every once in a while you get a big guest star role, but there's a formula to those TV shows.
Becoming a father increases your capacity for love and your level of patience. It opens up another door in a person - a door which you may not even have known was there. That's what I feel with my son. There's suddenly another level of love that expands. My son is my greatest joy, out of everything in my life.
Global warming is not only the number one environmental challenge we face today, but one of the most important issues facing all of humanity... We all have to do our part to raise awareness about global warming and the problems we as a people face in promoting a sustainable environmental future for our planet.
Yeah, I do all the stuff I can. Let’s be frank, if you are in an action film, you are not in it for the characters, you are in it for the action – the stunts. If they take that away from you, it’s a sad story. Ha ha! I have damaged everything: knees, elbows, ribs. But I’m an old gymnast. I know how to survive.