Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'd love to have written a film and it to be regarded as good. I'd just like to be doing things that are good, really. I think that's all you can aim for. I find it odd when actors say they just want to do films or plays or television. A lot of films aren't very good; a lot of television isn't very good; a lot of plays aren't very good.
Brain surgery is a fairly aggressive process. There's a lot to get through. There's the beautiful, delicate shaving first, which is really lovely. There's a wonderful ceremony of putting all the covers on, so only the little bit you're operating on is revealed. But once they make the incision and tear the skin back, the drill comes out.
I had traveled to Russia and met with Snowden, which was a pretty involved meeting that required encrypted communication and the like. And it was fascinating because of who he is and what he's done. And more so because what's going on between our two countries, Russia and the U.S., and to meet Edward Snowden in Russia was unforgettable.
I found that looking at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from an outside vantage point was actually quite distancing. The history of the conflict, the personalities, the violence, the distrust, and the seeming lack of viable solutions made meaningful involvement feel impossible. What changed that, for me, was changing the vantage point.
It's not that demanding. It's fun. That's one of the great things about being an actor. You get to learn all these things normal people don't get to learn. Going through hallways where it's basically like S.W.A.T. tactical stuff. Around hallways, how to cross, how to signal everyone. Then how to hold a gun, holster the gun - everything.
There was never a moment in George Carlin's career where he dipped below an A+. When he came out with the "Hippie Dippie Weatherman" on The Tonight Show, I mean, it seems so mundane now, but it was in black and white TV and the whole bit was that this guy smoked tons of grass and was a terrible weather man. "Forecast for tonight? Dark."
I think, here's what I've realized from interviewing people, and I've been very open about my Catholicism and my love of Christ and I don't care who knows it but I don't do it on stage. People that disagree with me that are listening to my podcast that are not Christian, I'm not trying to sell them Christianity and I make it very clear.
I've been on a quest for spiritual answers for a long time. The things I've learned about interconnectedness and non-duality and the feeling of tapping into your soul that goes beyond the edge of your skin is important to me. Once I learned that, I'm far less often trapped in my own little man problems. Me against the universe problems.
Yeah, in every film that I've been lucky enough to do with Tim, there's always some form of torture, and the nails were Tim's idea. They were the length of the fingers and stuff, but it was okay because I had a troop of people who would help me go to the bathroom. They had to have treatment afterwards but they're okay now. That is true.
I was one of those kids who kept trying on different skins in high school. I was very afraid to be myself around all of these kids, to really reveal any part of myself that was true, so I would try on different skins, try on different masks, hoping I'd hit on one that was cool or quirky or interesting enough that suddenly I would be OK.
If you go out eight times and play tennis eight times this week, yeah, it's the same rules, but it's a different game every time you're out on that court. You're working on a different part of your game every time you're out on that court; your partner's working on a different part of their game, and the act of being watched changes it.
It all started with the most basic level of Uta Hagen, right at the beginning. I'm like, 'Really? I came to grad school; I'm going to do the 'Respect for Acting'?' And I realized the importance of that, because it was really to just get you to get rid of everything. Get rid of everything you've learned and just start from the bottom up.
Part of me wanted to disappear into a cave in India, and I did end up going on retreats there, but, don't ask me why, I always felt very strongly that the point for me was to find a way to live a truly spiritual life in the modern day world and be able to work with all the positive aspects of our cultural and technological advancements.
When we make jokes about being lazy, or things that look like we're lazy parents, we don't want to make it appear like we're not also incredibly hardworking people when it comes to striving at our vocational things. I do think it's a conversation, but a lot of times, you make sacrifices for the sake of jokes, or for the sake of a scene.
I see similarities in the sports I played growing up in the sense of how I tackle a role when I get a job. A lot of effort goes in on an individual basis. There is a lot of time spent by yourself working on your craft and what you have to do. But, at the end of the day, you're there to serve the movie just like you would the rugby team.
With social media, you have this new kind of way to communicate with people that's very immediate, sometimes alarmingly so, sometimes painfully so. If you could just hold some objectivity, a very direct, unfiltered, raw reflection of the way something is landing in the culture without any spin, or filtration, or anything, it's very raw.
Sometimes you got to a point where it wasn't happening and you had to figure out another way to do it, particularly in terms of making the jaguar do what you wanted. That was not CG, a real guy had to run really fast and not trip. There was a form of restraint on the creature that you can't see. so it was all very safe - but it is real.
I just try not to subscribe to the ways of celebrity. I'm not a celebrity, I'm a working actor. A lot of the events -- the parties and the premieres that people go to to get noticed -- I'm just not into. I'll hang out with my friends, go see punk shows, read at home. At the same time, I have a production company, which is a lot of work.
I think my printing to this day looks like the printing right out of a comic book. Actually, I always wanted to be in a comic book. I watched cartoons when I was a kid, too, and both comics and cartoons lit fire in my imagination. This realm holds a lot of interest for me, a lot of passion for me. So to be comic-ized, yeah, that's cool.
Being a part of the crowd with incredible musicians onstage summoning the muse and delivering that to us - doesn't matter if it's an orchestra, two bluegrass banjo pickers, a solo singer, piano player, or Bruce Springsteen - when it all comes together, you can just feel as if you are a part of something bigger and grander than yourself.
When I met Harrison Ford I just kept thinking: "At what point do I break out my Star Wars memorabilia? When is it OK to have him sign something? Will he? And will I look like a total idiot!" The only time I ever got anything from another actor to sign was for my brother or my kids because both of my brothers are die-hard Star Wars fans.
With 'Duplicity', I was a little bit like, 'This isn't that hard of a movie.' This isn't like some huge brain trust of a movie. You gotta be a little bit awake to follow the plot, but it's really just a kind of light entertainment. It's like those Cary Grant movies, which are not meant to be anything other than diverting. In a nice way.
In real life, there are some times where a partner has cheated on somebody, and that person never found out about it. I have to imagine that that's happened before. It's a thing we don't really want to think about, because it's maybe the most painful thing to think about in a relationship - 'What if I've been cheated on and never knew?'
I just turned 40, and it's weird to think that I've been doing this almost my whole life. I was a child actor and then didn't do it through junior high and high school, then started up again in my late teens doing 'Young and the Restless.' Dabbled with school, went back to college, played around. I think I was doing Pleasantville at 23.
One of the challenges assembling the film was that gun fight went on for three and a half hours and we obviously couldn't spend three and a half hours of the film with one gun fight. It was trying to figure out the balance of how much an audience could take before they either became repulsed or desensitized or bored or just overwhelmed.
The secret to my 5 o'clock shadow is a little device called the George Michael 3000 Custom Beard Trimmer and Personal Massager. Just kidding. I actually shave every morning, and thanks to my vast knowledge of Eastern philosophy and mysticism, I will my facial hair to grow to the exact same length each day. Dave Grohl taught me that one.
I always had a separate life than just my work. I built my own family. I have my own hobbies and interests. I have a ranch with livestock and horses. I didn't always get my self-esteem and identity from acting. I never worked unless I wanted to. I never did anything just to do it, just for the paycheck. I always did things that I liked.
I was on the cusp - or thought I was on the cusp - of celebrity, the result of starring as an adorable curly-haired alien in the miniseries 'V' on NBC. 'V' was a hit, and then got green-lit as a series. During the hiatus, the only job I auditioned for that fit my schedule was 'Nightmare on Elm Street.' That's the real reason I said yes.
I have very liberal parents. People forget that Fidel Castro was on the cover of 'Time' magazine, and the one that I remember the most - it's not necessarily my favorite - was when they dressed me as Castro when I was eight years old. I was in fatigues, camouflage hat, beard and cigar. I don't think I did that well with candy that year.
What other people think of me is not my business. What I do is what I do. How people see me doesn't change what I decide to do. I don't choose projects so people don't see me as one thing or another. I choose projects that excite me. I think the problem is that people refuse to understand what drag is outside of their own belief system.
People deal with grief in many different ways. And some people in show business parade their relationships around like an accessory, and others like to keep it separate from business and commerce. It's perfectly fine to say, 'I actually don't want to talk about my love because that's not part of the fantasy world I created in commerce.'
When I left 'Being Human,' that was painful because the show was going on without me. But with 'Him & Her,' we finished on such a high together that if it is the end, it couldn't have stopped at a better time. But I hope with 'Him & Her' that we'll get another crack of the whip: that the writer might change his mind and write some more.
'Stand By Me' was really great for me and my buddies; we'd all watch that together because that was us - we were down in the creek and hanging out every day and going on little adventures. I had about sixteen friends who are all about the same age as me and lived in a three-block radius. We spent our entire childhood down in that creek.
The big problem in translating is that we had to translate the language. People may not know that we record the podcast in Japanese, translate it to English and then actors play us on the podcast. I'm not actually Scott Aukerman, I'm the actor who plays his voice on the podcast. Unfortunately, it's cost prohibitive on a television show.
Throughout my life, I have held the strongest belief that if you write down what you want to accomplish in your life: your dreams, goals, hopes and aspirations, you are much more likely to achieve them. I have been writing down my goals since I was a kid, and I've had more success than I could have ever dreamed of... one goal at a time.
When you get divorced, all the truths that come out, you sit there and go, 'What the f**k was I doing? What was I doing believing that this person was invested in this way?' Which is a fantastically strong humiliation in the best sense. It can make somebody very bitter and very hard and closed off, but I find it does the opposite to me.
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.
You gotta understand, there weren't a whole lot of roles for Hispanics in the Eighties, so comedy was really the way I could really feed myself and eventually feed my family. I was an actor who learned to be a comic, and it's cool to come back and get back into acting - move forward in the direction I started out to do in the beginning.
I know the difference between someone coming up to you on the street and saying, 'Hey, you're that dude, right. Yes, that's what I thought,' and somebody coming up and saying, 'Big fan of the show. Big fan of that character.' And that's nice. You're out there telling stories, you're hoping to find an audience, and it's very appreciated.
Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.
The only time it`s ever like work is when you don`t like what you`ve done. I`m very lucky in that I haven`t cultivated fame. Which, from what I`ve seen of my contemporaries, takes an enormous amount of time. I have a lot of respect for people that do it and they`re successful at it ... Especially people that aren`t such talented actors.
'Aladdin' was probably my favorite Disney animation when I was a kid. The animation was great and Robin Williams was unbelievable as the Genie. 'Aladdin' was an amazing adventure and the lead character was a hero for guys, which I loved. It wasn't a princess or a girl beating the odds; it was a street rat. That seemed really cool to me.
My father got a job at Bradford University in textiles. And he came for - I guess, you know, why do people immigrate? - like, for a better life to find, you know, a new world. And, you know, I think he always - he saw it as an opportunity. And so yeah so we came to this coal mining town in the north of England and that's where I grew up.
The Russo brothers are the best people ever, and they cast me in 'Happy Endings.' I did text Joe Russo to say, 'I don't think my character dies, so if you need a local news cameraman to show up in 'Captain America 2'... I know it doesn't make sense, but just hear me out on this!' He was really cool about it and turned me down right away.
Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' -the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity.
All I can say is that you only realize how big your mountain is once youre laying motionless, helpless, and hopeless in the valley below. No one goes there on purpose, if you get what Im saying, because the only way to find your personal low is to slip and roll down that mountain of yours, straight through to the bottom, no holds barred.
If I wasn't prepared knowing every year there is a huge chance of a fire that will require me to evacuate my property, then I'm an ignoramus. If people at this point don't see that terrorism is a reality, and don't take steps to prepare themselves a little more than they were the day before, then they are also an irresponsible ignoramus.
I feel that as a writer and as a performer too. I never really thought about backstory for characters. It was much more of a musical approach: You learn a melody, and then you sing it, I suppose, or you find a rhythm or a cadence that works for the material. And then it's sort of about hitting that note correctly and finding those beats.
My friends are trying to get me to go out on blind dates. Big 'NO' to that because all my friends are a bunch of lying geeks. They're always like, 'Brian, you're really gonna dig this girl. She's got Traci Lords' eyes, Michelle Pfeiffer's nose, Kim Basinger's lips.' Yeah, they always forget to tell me she's also got Charlie Brown's head.
If you're playing your character and you're running into all these people who know who you are and treat you in a way that doesn't pertain at all to the character, it takes you out of it more, so when you're alone in a city where people don't know you, you can kind of pretend even more and get into the head space of where you need to be.