Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Rory is very established in England, which you are seeing right now with Bond. But his father Roy Kinnear was a very, very beloved comedy actor here in the UK. And Rory actually even looks a bit like his dad. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that Rory has such good comic chops because it's in his blood. He's very, very funny as Sean.
To me, the difference between New York and London is that things are boring and staid in London. But even the sh-tty diner and bars here are kind of exciting for me. Downtown is funky, West Village is beautiful with the cobbled streets, but I love going uptown because you then you go, "F-ck, I'm in New York!" You see all the skyscrapers.
Sam Kinison was one of the most compulsive people I'd ever seen. James Belushi was that way, and Chris Farley was that way. He was incredibly talented and made me laugh so hard, and there was nothing he wouldn't say. Such a unique, amazing, cynical, realistic, but still optimistic look at life he had. It was great fun to get to know him.
I put in all the dirty words. It works really well. The thing that we found with 'Drive Angry,' more than anything else is that we wrote the movie that we wanted to see. I've done that before. I've wanted to see 'Jason X'. It did not become the movie that I thought it would be. That happens. It's happened with every movie I've ever done.
Truth is, I'll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.
The network was fantastic, but you get a lot of anxiety with any production. It was very helpful to have both of us because we could back each other up. As a creator, a director and a filmmaker, you often get assaulted and you lose perspective because you have all of this pressure. It was so nice to call him and say, "What do you think?"
Basically ... out of all the ridiculous religion stories which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous—the silliest one I've ever heard is, 'Yeah ... there's this big giant universe and it's expanding, it's all gonna collapse on itself and we're all just here just 'cause ... just 'cause'. That, to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever.
One thing I had on my side when it came to How to Make It in America is that I'm a born-and-raised New Yorker. Filming in New York... I'm so thankful and humbled by the whole experience. A lot of it takes place in old neighborhood; I'm an East Village kid, so I get to see my old friends from the neighborhood, my family still lives there.
If I had done some of the movies that I was offered as an actor - and very good movies, by the way, and some of them big moneymakers - I don't know that I ever would have taken what was the concentration or the time to do the movies that I produced. 'Reds' is a good example, but 'Shampoo' is also an example, and so was 'Heaven Can Wait.'
I just love the people I work with so much, you know. It's an embarrassment of riches to get to work with Kristen Schaal and Mel Rodriguez and Mary Steenburgen and Boris Kodjoe and Cleopatra Coleman and January Jones, but then to get to bring Jason Sudeikis into the mix, you know, we're like brothers from all that time we spent together.
The minute you read something and you can't understand it, you can be sure it was written by a lawyer. Then, if you give it to another lawyer to read and he don't know just what it means, then you can be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer. If it's in a few words and is plain, and understandable only one way, it was written by a non-lawyer.
I remember thinking when I was younger - we used to take holidays to Spain and France, and I just thought I was never going to get further than Spain or France. I really didn't when I was younger. And then I started auditioning for 'Narnia,' and the first thing when I got the part was go straight to New Zealand, halfway around the world.
When you're adapting, you are working on someone else's problem that they have already solved. The work has been fine-tuned and read countless times, and you're just arriving at the end and taking what you want, so of course it is the regal way to moviemaking. Plays are just the ideal scripts - the structure is there and waiting for you.
Leonard [Nimoy] was such a teacher for me. He was one of the most fully realized human beings I have ever known on every level - in his personal life with his personal relationships and his love for his wife and his evolution with his family. Then as an artist, as an actor, as a writer, as a poet, and as a photographer. He never stopped.
I like dreams. I think there's a lot of information in them. I spent a lot of time on Jungian analysis and dreams are an elemental part of that process. Carl Jung believed very much in the power archetypes in dreams, what dream imagery means, and how you can tie it into deeper self examination. It's a big part of the therapeutic process.
It's funny: in the middle of making 'The Muse,' I was offered, at the time, the first 'Ice Age,' the part that Ray Romano took: I was offered the elephant. And I couldn't even stop to breathe, so I didn't do it. They've made, like, six of them. And in the animation business, for a voice actor, that's what you want. You want six, you know?
We live in an age of apologies. Apologies, fake or true, are expected from the descendants of empire builders, slave owners and persecutors of heretics, and from men who -in our eyes- just got it all wrong. So, with the age of 85 coming up shortly, I want to make an apology. It appears I must apologize for being male, white, and European.
There are so many brilliant, trained actors of color in America. If you just think about it, every year in the spring Julliard and NYU and Yale and hundreds of schools across the country graduate classes of trained actors, and in those classes are actors of color. So to say that there aren't enough actors of color is factually inaccurate.
It is rare, with people who are on television or celebrities or actors - it's rare to go to their house for a party and find they cooked. That's rare. Usually people don't cook for their own parties, and they don't buy their own gifts. There are people that do that, and that is a special thing. Those kind of little human touches are nice.
When you did impressions on 'MADtv,' the producers gave you a Walkman that played huge sections of whatever movie was being parodied, with your character's catchphrases recorded on a loop. You'd wear this thing around during rehearsals and for a week listen to the voice you had to impersonate over and over again. It drove all of us crazy.
On 'Lab Rats,' I read the script probably three or four times before we ever even do a table read because I want to be completely prepared. And I want to know exactly which beats I have to hit and where I need to make something comical. Some lines need a little more than others do just to get the point across, to get the joke to be funny.
To be a good director, you have to spend a lot of time on actual sets, but today, there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time in dark rooms writing a script, and they'll go in and tell the story to some suit at a studio who says, 'Okay, this is great, let's go.' But that doesn't necessarily mean you know what to do once you're on set.
I was very, very young when I first started acting. My first movie role I was in, I was eight years old at the time. My mom got me involved in community theater stuff when I was like five or six years old. How I learned to read was by reading the captions on TV, and I grew up from a really young age watching tons of movies and television.
There is a huge fan base, they're very knowledgeable and very loyal. I was astonished - before I started working on the series I didn't know anything about Game of Thrones. I hadn't heard of the books. When it started going out, people were coming up to me in the street saying [fake cockney accent] "oh, Game of Thrones, f------ wonderful.
I've never been one for late nights, which is why I have always preferred making films to theatre. A play takes over your life: you start to feel sick at lunchtime, and by mid-afternoon, you're wishing for a bomb scare so the whole thing will be called off. Of course, if the evening goes well and you get the applause, then it's wonderful.
Being a best-selling author just means the world for me. Some of my happiest memories, growing up, are being at book stores and reading books I couldn't afford, as a kid, and the midnight parties, waiting for the next Harry Potter book. The fact that I have that straw in my cap means more to me than anything I've ever accomplished before.
This medium that we're working in - film and television - for an audience, it's like you live through these characters because it's things you can't do in real life. Places you're not prepared to go in real life as a decent human being, anyway. Because if you're a conscientious person, so you live kind of vicariously through these people.
My mom's always been a good cook, so I took a lot of stuff from her, but most of the stuff I took from Emeril or Bobby Flay right off the TV and make it. I just loved to cook, so it just became a thing. It's a release. Even if I'm alone, I'll cook a full meal, maybe even a two-course meal, just because I love to cook. It's my secret love!
'The Conversation' is one that, if you watch 'The Conversation' for the opening sequence, where you hear a conversation taking place as the master - this zoom from way up is zooming in over a park. And I was just absolutely blown away by it because you can hear exactly what's happening, but you don't see. You've got no idea who's talking.
My mum died of leukemia when I was in high school - she lost her life at 40. It was very hard, and I didn't do that much in Chicago after that. I actually sat around and didn't do anything for three years. I didn't know what I wanted to do anymore because my everything was gone. I was a mama's boy, and I had to turn into a man real quick.
Wes Anderson is a perfectionist, so you have to just be ready to try it this way, try it this way, try it that way, and then try it this way. And then, once you think you've got it all and it's done, then you're going to be called back in two or three months so you can try it that way and try it this way. You've got to give him all of it.
Just keep acting is my plan, I just want to keep going for as long as I can. I've had a fantastic time on Potter, I will be very sad to leave it because every time I look back on one of these films, every scene I watch will be forever linked to a memory of what happened that day or something that was happening around that time in my life.
I had been on another procedural show, 'Cold Case,' for seven years, and I certainly respected the legacy of 'Law & Order,' even though I had only seen a handful of episodes. Being a dad meant the reality was that I probably knew more about Dora and Diego. But I saw the show with fresh eyes, and I wasn't coming in with a bunch of baggage.
I find the older I get, the lower in weight I go. It's harder to recover. Living in New York City, working a job that is unpredictable and at times stressful, you're lifting way more than your max because you need to push some weight around. You put an extra plate on for the release, and then you're sore the next week. Its stress release.
When they [young people] believe they are the difference! That their voice matters and to use the incredible power each one of them has. I work with an amazing young man, Jaylen Arnold, who started a foundation and a movement to educate people about tolerance and to stop bullying when he was eight years old. He never ceases to inspire me.
I needed to put something together that would continually get me up at 4:30 in the morning, get me to work and get me excited to throw on those costumes - which clearly continue to excite me, if you are a viewer of the show - and circumstances that continue to surprise me and ask me to go places acting-wise that I haven't explored before.
I've had times when I've done what seems like a thousand interviews to promote a film that I'm in. I start to think that I'm the best thing that ever happened to the world, talkin' about myself for cryin' out loud. Then I come home, and my wife needs me to help with dinner and empty the garbage, and the kids need help with their homework.
When I was a freshman at Yale, one teacher brought me up after class and said, 'You're trying to undermine my class.' And I thought to myself, 'Oh my God, I'm going to be kicked out of school on the first week.' Not only do I not have a sense of self, I don't even know what she's talking about. I don't even know how to undermine anything.
I feel when acting, I am sometimes overly self-conscious; I think, 'Going, no, don't, put your eyebrow back where it was and, you know, turn to the left.' You know, I'm sort of very consciously adopting this character. But with music, I don't know. I found it was a question of just closing my eyes and just sort of letting things come out.
I love Satan. Christianity is so boring. If Star Wars didn't have that evil imprint, they wouldn't sell two tickets. Satan sells tickets. That dude, Darth Maul, he was down with Satan. Put it this way, Satan loves to party, he loves to f**k and he loves to eat rich, delicious food. Actually that sounds a lot like Kyle Gass (his bandmate).
The very first concert I ever went to was a Green Day concert when I was 12 years old, at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga, Ont., and I remember right after seeing them perform I started a band, and I wanted to get up in front of people and start performing. Ten years later, to be on the Green Day 'American Idiot' tour is really awesome.
I had a lot of bad jobs but the one big internship I had is I interned for 'SNL' when I was 21 years old and that was the joke. You intern there and you think man, I'm going to be with the writers and the great comedians. Then you're getting everybody sandwiches and then the doors close and then all the great creatives are doing the work.
For me, Yves Saint Laurent is a hero because he fought his whole life against illness. Maybe the only way to fight this illness for him was to make it positive with creation. Otherwise he would have been lonely or in the hospital. He had so many issues with alcohol, drugs, and everything, this explains a lot about his necessity to create.
I had great, great times as a Little League coach. People were talking about me quitting acting, and they would say, What about your creative juices? Coaching is creative, because you could take a kid who thought he wasn't any good and, within four minutes, change his mind. And I didn't have to wait six months for them to put music to it.
I did worry about being in a science-fiction show. The bits that I was reading, I felt were funny, and I felt the man was childish, so I really did ask initially, "Is this for kids?" And the thing that came back immediately was like, "Hey, take a look at this whole thing again. This is definitely not for children. How can you think that?"
My dad wanted me to be a professional person, which I was - I was a civil engineer. I graduated from civil engineering at USC in California. I became an engineer, and I helped design the roads for the L.A. County Roads Department. And I did that for about one and a half years in a sense to please my parents - to be a 'respectable' person.
That's the thing that continues to blow me away and just never ceases to amaze me. Younger people continue to seek out this show and find it, and we get approached by 11-year-olds who say, 'Oh, my God, 'Psych' is my favorite show.' It's like, 'You weren't born when we started making that!' It's fascinating - and also awesome and humbling.
I'm a dirty kid: I like to be outside, I like to run about, I like to get messy. So I spent a lot of time outside as a kid, skating and just being a disaster. I was obsessed with Dogtown - I still am obsessed with Dogtown, the Z-Boys. I love Stacy Peralta and Jay Adams and Andrew Reynolds, all these guys. I used to think I was Chad Muska.
When you're at drama school you spend so much time working on amazing texts and analyzing them, digging into them, and figuring out why it happens, why you are being asked to say what you're saying, and what the words mean. But then when you start working, most of the stuff would just fall apart if you subject it to that kind of scrutiny.
When I was really young, my mom enrolled me in dance classes. "Mom, I'm too young to dance," I told her. She kind of forced me, but I ended up loving it, and after the first lesson I came back and said, "Come on, Mom, I'll show you the box step." That introduced me not just to dancing but also to working with someone without having a goal.