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I grew up in the South where they are very, very passionate about sports, and I was the artsy kid who didn't know much about it. I found I kind of enjoyed the social aspect, and I enjoyed the tailgating. I went for the free food and the experience. But to this day, I'm still learning. You're not going to see me watching it by myself, but if there are nachos involved, I'm there.
Anytime that I have an impulse to pull out my phone and take a picture, especially of a landscape or something, if the first thing I do is reach for the phone, I actually force myself to sit there and at least wait thirty seconds before I actually grab my phone. I'm, like, "No, sit here for thirty seconds, and just see what you think about. What does this make you think about?"
I know things are going to get better in spite of both sides. Then when things do get better, then you'll hear the yell that will go up. The Democrats will swear that recovery was due to them. Now the Republicans, they'll say it was due to them. Nobody wanted to claim the credit for the country blowing up, but wait until it starts picking up and they'll both be on it then. See?
People think you have this exciting and romantic life, because you project this exciting, romantic life on screen. But in reality you're just doing the same thing as everyone else - you know, sitting around watching TV with your gut hanging out, playing with your kid, or even sitting on the toilet. You know what's weird? Even I'm not that interested in my personal life any more.
For some reason as a kid growing up in Lubbock, Texas, I always thought I was going to go to UCLA. I think it was because they had such great sports teams, and it was in California, where the actors were. But even though I was talking about being an actor when I was young, I was first going to be a football player. My dream was "I'm going to go to UCLA and be a football player."
Since I've started to star in pictures I have always managed to retain my singularity of purpose when I got into the business, which was to be an artist, as an actor, more than anything else. But to get the certain kind of role you want, you have to be in a certain position in the business and it's dog-eat-dog and it gets very hairy and you can lose your point of view sometimes.
All cultures are different. Some commit genocide. Some are uniquely peaceful. Some have enormous hunting festivals or annual stretches when nobody speaks. Some don't use electricity. In American culture, we obsess about celebrities. We create them, build myths around them, and then hunt them and destroy them. I don't know where its taking us or what it means but I know we do it.
You run your plays, you know your plays, you study your plays, you study the other team, you do as much as you can, you go to practice, you get in shape, you do what you need to do, and then by the time you get to the game, you know your plays, but they have to feel like they're in your bones. That has to be an unconscious thing, it cannot be conscious. That is everything to me.
I found a treehouse. I found this weird tree, out in a field, and someone had put a piece of a fence, way up in a tree. I just went up there and went to sleep for a few hours, in full cowboy regalia. And someone did take a photo. I have a photo of it, somewhere. It brought me back to when I was 12 years old, sitting in a treehouse and imagining that I was in a Western somewhere.
That pipe, just so happens to lead to the room where I make the most delicious flavored chocolate covered fudge." Then he will be made into strawberry flavoered chocolate covered fudge, they'll be selling him by the pound, all over the world!" No, I wouldn't allow it. The taste would be terrible. Can you imagine Augustus flavored chocolate covered gloop? Ew. No one would buy it.
My children's favorite, and it's funny because they've seen it but they have a difficult time watching it because it's their dad and they make that connection, but Edward Scissorhands is by far my kids' favorite. They just connect with the character, and they see their dad feeling that isolation, that loneliness. He's a tragic character, so I think it's hard for them. They bawl.
Some people don't have an open mind, and when I was traveling to different places I think I found it hard to enjoy things. You know, I come from a great city where there are lots of things happening, and if you end up in a small town where you don't have all those things you can feel the difference. Somewhere along the way, though, I think I learned to appreciate the difference.
Childhood hunger in America is as much a paradox as it is a tragedy. Why, in the wealthiest country in the world, should hunger darken the lives and dreams of 12 million children and their families? I believe that, when Americans learn the facts and understand how their involvement can make a difference, banishing childhood hunger will be a national, local and personal priority.
The two sports are as different as Ping-Pong and rugby. In boxing, you don’t know what’s going to happen. In wrestling, it’s already prearranged. But the thing I didn’t know about wrestling is that you really get hurt. Because, you know, you’re wrestling in front of a live audience, and you end up doing things like jumps or slams, and 40 percent of the time you don’t land right.
I have a problem with writer/directors, personal. I can't work well with both of them on the set, if both of them are giving instructions. Writers tend to be in love with what they wrote. You can't always translate the words into the meaning, sometimes the meaning is better served without the words, difficult to make a writer to try to understand that. It gets, sometimes, tense.
Each week I pack my bag and travel the country, I go to people who write me and tell me their problems. I appear whether at their house or at their job site or some neighborhood gathering. I come there and listen to their story and I get hands on as I say. I don t give advice, I give people hope, I build their self-esteem, I motivate 'em. I inspire them because that's what I do.
Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great - I'm taking myself as a character - for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the vulgarian.
I spent the past week here in India getting a sense of the reality of HIV and AIDS in people's lives. Fathers and mothers are dying, leaving children with no support. Stigma and discrimination is ruining the family lives. There is an urgent need for education, information, and increased awareness of HIV and AIDS. The response needs to be now. We cannot afford to become fatigued.
What Clint Eastwood meant was when you are directing and starring in a film, there's a temptation to spend more time on the other actors' performances, and then when you get to your own work, you kind of go, "Oh, yeah, well, let's cut that." And he said, "Take your time and make sure you do your work right." It's especially good advice if you're going from one career to another.
Everybody thinks that you go to Africa and you build a school, or you teach English, or you build a hospital. But actually all you need to do is play football with kids for six months and then after they've trusted you, you tell them about the truth of Aids, and that their grandmother didn't die from witchcraft, she died from Aids. And that's the biggest difference you can make.
Quentin [Taranino] will say, "We've got it, but we're gonna do it one more time. Why?" And then, the entire cast and crew chimes in and says, "Because we love making movies!" He is a person who celebrates this form of expression, and it is evident in his movies, his conversations, his extensive knowledge about the history of what we do, and the actors and crew that he assembles.
Basically, I didn't want to sing anything for the sake of singing it. There were some songs where I really wailed, but because it's such an intimate space anything I chose to sing simply to make sound was going to come off an inauthentic. So I was really happy with where it landed - every song I sang, I loved for one reason or another. I didn't have to worry about selling a song.
I never went to drama school. I went straight into the theater. We had the most extraordinary voice teacher. I worked with her when I was starting out in my career. How to place my voice from a very relaxed position was all wonderfully reminiscent of going back to the basics. But I always like to do that with any role that I do, to dismantle it and put it all back together again.
Celebrity and charity have been bedfellows for many years. The key is to try and choose practical, sound and effective ones. There is no shortage of solicitation for endorsement, so you have to really know what you're getting behind and be passionate about it. In this case, aside from just being a spokesperson, they're benefiting a form of expression that is dear to me, painting.
Famous Playboy Hugh Hefner managed to successfully stop an order of monks from operating a business on his property. The police forced the friars to close down their stall, which was outside the Playboy mansion where they had been selling flowers. Said one friar, well, if it was anyone else we may have gotten away from it, but, unfortunately, only Hugh can prevent florist friars.
I remember at the time, there were all these teen movies being made. It was this resurgence of John Hughes-esque teen comedies. I was sent a lot of them to audition for, and a lot of them at the time didn't really impress me. I remember I was sent one called East Grand Rapids High, which ended up becoming American Pie, and I didn't like it. Although I think I did audition for it.
I know I have within myself... a side of solitude. I think people who know me can see, but people who just meet me can't because I'm generally very fun and gregarious. I love to spend a lot of time on my own. I can seriously go into my own head and often love to let myself travel where I don't know where I'm going. I always felt that that was his kind of form of escape, in a way.
A friend of mine is trying to do a documentary where he brings Jewish and Arab comedians to occupied territories in Israel. He wants to do shows as a way of finding some comedic common denominator. When he proposed the idea to one of the officials at the Jenin refuge camp, the guy just stared at him and said, "This is not a joke to us. We don't think that laughing is the answer."
Once, during an interview in front of my wife, I was asked, "Are you one of those actors who brings your character home? Do you stay in character?" I said, "No, not really. I don't do that," and she started laughing. I asked her why. She said, "Well, you might think you don't bring characters home, but you do." So, while I don't feel like a character is lingering, it probably is.
There is still so much that I want to see and do, but for me, it's the pure satisfaction of doing what you really want. I always had a problem doing things that I didn't want to do. I don't have a problem when my director says: "Don't do it like this; I want it like this." But generally in life, I like to do what I want, and for me the best way is through acting and making films.
The people on the QVC shopping channel convince me that life is worth living. They see the good in everything. People who go to counselling should actually go to a room with a QVC seller for half an hour and let them find the qualities within them. For example, they'd look at me and say, 'To anybody else this looks like a stomach but, actually, his feet never get wet in the rain.
I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people's shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be - to not try to look at the world in a sense of "I'm not going to judge somebody. I'm going to try to understand who they are and what they're about."
I’ve been friends with all these people for so many years now…. I’m so lucky to have Jennifer [Lawrence] and Josh [Hutcherson] and Woody [Harrelson] and all these other great people. We’ve created really strong bonds. It’s like high school because we’ll mess around for half the day and then we’ll do a little bit of work. Everyone’s goofing around and trying to mess each other up.
I am totally for gun control in the U.S. The population of America is roughly 300 million and there are 300 million guns in this country, which is terrifying. Every day we're seeing some kid running rampant in a school. And do you know what the gun lobby's response to Newtown was? The National Rifle Association's official response was, 'If that teacher had been armed' It's crazy.
I don't have any conscious memory of wanting to be an actor, but early on, there was something in my makeup that I felt comfortable with. Then when I was around five or six, I started going to the movies and gradually it dawned on me that I was like one of those people on the screen. And that was it. There was never any question or doubt about what I was going to do for a living.
I look at a pilot and go, "I see the landscape. I see the characters. I see the direction and the potential of the story." And I also go, "That didn't work. I could change that. Maybe that works. I don't know. We'll see." For me, I look at it, as an actor, as what can I improve upon? So, to have it out there and judged solely on its own merit is really a unique experience for me.
Chicago PD has a rule that if you work in Chicago you have to live in Chicago. Some areas don't have that rule.So oftentimes you get people from different environments that get thrown into environments with people that they never spent time with before in they life. On a daily basis or in their personal life. The only access they had to these type of people was through the media.
I am a creative artist. I have the ability to radiate. Lifting my arms above me, I soar above the earth. Lowering my arms, I continue to soar. In the air moving around my head and shoulders, I experience the power of thoughts. In the air moving around my chest, I experience the power of feelings. In the air moving around my legs and feet, I experience the power of will. I am that
It's weird, sometimes I still see myself as just starting out. I tend to forget how much I've been doing, but in the beginning it is about the hustle, being out there and doing the work. Nothing is going to come to you, you have to get out there and do the work, and I've been doing that. But sometimes it's good to take a break and let these things air out. Reflect and take it in.
What I think I know about dating is that you can't take back something you say in a date. You can't lie, and you can't pretend to be someone you're not unless it's not going well and you never see them again. It never works if you try to make yourself seem like someone you're not, and you want to keep dating them. Be yourself. Don't embellish. It will always come back to get you.
At 19, if a woman said no, no meant no. If she didn't say anything and she was open, and she was down, it was like how far can I go? If I touch her breast and she's down for me to touch her breast, cool. If I touch her lower, and she's down and she's not stopping me, cool. I'm going to kiss her or whatever. It was simply if a woman said no or pushed you away that was non-consent.
People have suggested that perhaps we are too affluent to be telling this story, which is amazing to me because then I wonder what story I am allowed to tell. Having been working with the homeless for the past years, I noticed lots of things about them, but one thing I really noticed was that they were probably too busy just getting though the day to make a film about themselves.
And consequently, you have this rich looking film, which gives it this kind of muscular feel, deep focus, soft focus look. I'm not that great on development. I can see where things go wrong, but Beau, Carl and Mike Finch, they worked on it relentlessly. And then I would see the material and I would say, "Well, that just doesn't ring true. I don't quite know why that's happening."
I'm very happy where I am, with the comradery with the incredible actors, producers and writers [of The Strain]. I am ready and very excited to work here. There is a potential here. Even though survival here is hard, work is hard and commitment is harder, the potential for where you can go can bring you further. This is the country that is possible. That's not possible in Europe.
Of course I am frustrated with regard to extreme poverty, to violence that never seems to cease. Greed is the key. It's easy to sit in relative luxury and peace and pontificate on the subject of the Third World debts. Not many of us are willing to give up everything we have. We can however give some, and millions of people do, governments do, but there is so much more to be done.
I think distribution has become a lot harder. With the whole explosion of digital video, there's just a lot more people making films. Distributors have a lot more choice. I do think there's an audience out there for small films. It's obvious to me what the studios do: they've co-opted independent film. They all have their independent arm. They can afford to crush the competition.
In a way it was a modern story but it played to all those 1980 slasher movies. We did the same thing with this. Patrick wanted to do a 1970's road movie and if you'll see, this is a modern story but it's got so much 1970's in your face feel to it. So that was the point, to take that stuff that we loved growing up and sort of do it for today. I think we accomplished it. We'll see.
We had a great lunch. Senator Capper paid for it. The Republican pays, as usual. And everything that the Democrats are doin' now, the Republicans pay for it. Everybody asks me, "Will, how long is this going to go on, spending all this money and everything going like this?" I says, "Well, it will go on just as long as the Republicans has got any money. That's all I know about it."
Politics are receiving a lot of attention because we have nothing else to interest us. No nation in the history of the world was ever sitting as pretty. If we want anything, all we have to do is go and buy it on credit. So that leaves us without any economic problem whatever, except perhaps some day to have to pay for them. But we are certainly not thinking about that this early.
What I can't completely understand is most other people's fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies. Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognize their names and faces but know nothing else about them? Why do we care what they think, what they wear, what they eat?