Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can give the greatest performance possible, but if you don't have a director who's pointing the camera in the right direction and an editor who's editing it properly, it doesn't matter what you do. The director and the editor are the most important people. Not the actors. Sometimes the writer is important. But if you don't have a good director, you can't have a good production.
I've been able to do a lot of things in the movies. I've been able to run with the buffalo, you know. I've been able to pitch a perfect game in Yankee Stadium. I've been in the bathtub with Susan Sarandon. I've had a lot of chances to do a lot of things. I enjoy sports, but I enjoy sports so much to the point that I wouldn't do the movie unless I thought it had a chance to be good.
I can't judge the characters I play, because it's for the audience to do. What I can try to do is to understand and embody what were they going through? How did they make the decisions they made? That to me is a more interesting way to approach something, rather than saying this person is a villain and that person is this and - because it's not very interesting to play that anyway.
Faith takes us to deep places, to the ruptures in our self-confidence and our lives. Do not settle for spiritual comfort all the time...Darkness is divine also. Faith is not about positive thinking so much as about what kicks in when we are weak, sick, and short of self-confidence. The via positiva never stands alone. The via negativa is always with us on our faith journey as well.
The hardest thing was going through different stages of weight loss. At the beginning, it was easy to take off the weight with exercise and eating less but then you reach a point where 90 per cent of the weight loss is achieved purely through reducing your calorie intake. My goal was to lose four pounds per week. That worked well for the first few months but then things got tricky.
I must admit, the only reason I joined an amateur dramatic society is because I couldn't get to kiss any girls - I was chasing girls all the time - and so I thought if I join it, there might be some love scenes. And there was a particular girl and I thought I might get to kiss Amy. I never did get to kiss Amy but I did get to kiss Elizabeth Taylor, so it was all right, a lot later.
I feel like I'll be defined more so by ... when I get a chance to play roles where I'm the father/husband. I'd like to continue with the action stuff, but when I get to play the father/husband role, I think that will be the time where I'm playing who I really am. I look forward to playing those kind of heroic characters, the types that are usually associated with Denzel Washington.
When it's all over I won't miss the bruises he gave me to impress girls, or the occasional scar which will give me a story to tell my grandchildren, but I'll definitely miss the pranks and the laughing and all the making fun of each other. I'll miss the funky advice he gives me about everything - football, girls, video games, clothes. Most of all, I'll miss having an older brother.
I don't want to name names because I don't want to draw too many direct comparisons but the history of Fascism is populated by people who need to subjugate other people and elevate their status and power to a level which is supreme. Usually, any psychological study of those people will reveal a sort of lost, damaged child, who is somehow heartbroken and doesn't have any self-worth.
The most difficult thing has definitely been movies. From a comedian's standpoint, you think being real big is the best thing, but with movies, the screen is huge, you're big anyway! Also, coming from a TV personality - MTV was all about high energy and selling the hottest video - I had to learn to [take it down]. A lot of characters I'm playing are not necessarily that kind of guy.
That was a really interesting series [Threshold ] that I think would've been really great had it continued. I know Brannon Braga, who was running the show at the time, had a lot of really interesting ideas for what was going to happen the second, third, fourth, and fifth seasons, and they had it really planned out what was going to go on. But CBS just decided to pull the plug on it.
There was this one time in Vegas when I took four Victoria's Secret models and did one gram off each of their bodies within, like, 45 minutes. I declared myself King of Vegas and decided to remodel my hotel room with my bare hands to resemble King Louis XIV's bedroom at Versailles. Knocked down two entire walls, and later had four knuckle surgeries. Still wasn't as high as Rob Ford.
When you get called the n-word, as a black person you can do anything. It's like getting a gold star in Super Mario Brothers and junk. I hear the music when I hear the n-word. I get right into it; I get really into it. You can do anything. You could be in a fancy restaurant - just start throwing poop at the walls. People be like, 'What are you doing?' 'Someone called him the n-word.
When I look at the directors that I really love, who really develop their films over time, they're almost always the ones who go back again and again and again at the same investigations. I think that when somebody has a theme they go after, it's fun to service that. It's like, "I know you now. I know what you go at." It helps you locate yourself a little bit quicker in their world.
When you're doing physical comedy, everybody's involved, not just the actors. Everybody's behind the scenes following them, and we've got Jillian the cinematographer running after them, then we've got three guys behind her who are cable-wranglers running with her so she doesn't trip on it. Every day was a mad-dash to the finish line. Every day was so stressful. Every day was so fun.
I've played people that are on the line of evil and good, but that's life. We are always playing with the good and the bad. I see them as people. I don't see them as caricatures. I try to not make them caricatures. Maybe I fail, but I try to see what' behind them. Would I play the hero? A superhero? I don't think so. But, I play good guys. There are some there, but you have to look.
I get cast gay a fair amount throughout my life. It's not the first time. Matt [Letscher] was kind of like, 'Jeff, um, I'm gonna pretend this is real easy and not a problem, but I've never done this at all.' And so you know, we were awkward for a while. And then he said, 'Let's go for it. Come on. I'm gonna pretend you're my girlfriend, my wife. Here we go.' And we had a lot of fun.
I certainly play people on the edge quite a lot. I am interested in what makes people odd and what makes them different. In life I try to play the edges. I have a horror of the herd. There are many, many different sorts of people. A lot of people are fairly uninteresting. I want to play the interesting ones. The villains are always more interesting to portray. Shakespeare knew that.
As an actor, you don't want to know the beginning and end to your character's arc. It makes it more fun. You're not playing the end. You're playing it realistically. You don't know where this character is going to go and what's going to happen to him, which just makes it more interesting for the viewers to watch. They're going on the journey with you, as the actor and the character.
We don't always possess faith in the sense of having a clear embodiment of something to hang on to. The relationship between the intellect and faith is a very curious one. Sometimes the intellect can point us to faith, sometimes the intellect can stand in the way of faith. Sometimes, as St John of the Cross points out, we have to darken or blind the intellect in order to have faith.
We live in such a corporate world where everyone is passing the buck, it seems to me. Therefore I like stories where the individual takes responsibility for BEING the individual, and not just for himself, but for his comrades, his society and ultimately for his country. Ultimately, we can all learn a lesson from that and not be browbeaten by the corporate world which is taking over.
Listen, I know how old I am and that I'm just a shoulder injury from losing roles like the one in Taken. So I stay with the training, I stay with the work. It’s easy enough to plan jobs, to plan a lot of work. That's effective. But that’s the weird thing about grief. You can’t prepare for it. You think you’re gonna cry and get it over with. You make those plans, but they never work.
Well, I kind of approach both of them similarly in (that) I always see it as a movie first because that's my background. Cindy Kelley, who has been my writing partner on my novels, she works more on the prose side and the description side of the storytelling because, obviously, there's a lot more of that in a novel than in a screenplay. You only have up to 120 pages in a screenplay.
I remember working with Jackie Chan on Shanghai Noon [2000], and when we were working on the script, I thought that my character thought about being an outlaw the way a kid today would think about being a rock star, as a way to impress girls. So it was just kind of a funny idea, but once we had that idea, it changed the character and made it something that was funnier to me to play.
An agent friend of mine who will remain nameless said you can't make a romance about homeless people; nobody wants to see them kiss. And I thought, what a repulsive, repugnant, extraordinary thing to say. I had to think about the fact that the world is probably full of other people who feel like that. The very idea that we spend time trying to humanize humans is extraordinary to me.
You look at the world and see how scary it can be sometimes and still try to deal with the fear. Comedy can deal with the fear and still not paralyze you or tell you that it's going away. You say, OK, you got certain choices here, you can laugh at them and then once you've laughed at them and you have expunged the demon, now you can deal with them. That's what I do when I do my act.
The mantle of glamour has been taken from the women and given to the men. The women toil in their shadows, plain and ordinary-looking. So that transition has left a void. It is a void for drop-dead, impossible, over-the-top glamour. Supermodels fill that void. The only thing they have to do is work the runway, sweetie, and refuse to get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars.
I think you can be politically incorrect, but there's some responsibility with that. You've got to make sure that you are not condoning or bolstering any racial or other stereotypes. You've got to be free to make jokes, but just make sure...you don't want to go and black face somewhere to just prove a point. If it's insulting and offensive just for the sake of it that's problematic.
What I've learned, more than anything, as a young actor who has been in the business for 10 years, is just to be around guys and girls, like Ron Perlman, Bill Lucking, Kim Coates, Tommy Flanagan, Katey Sagal, who have been in this business for a very long time, and to learn what to do and what not to do from them, every day, and to see how they navigate through their Hollywood life.
If there's anything I could undo - usually when I want to undo things its like right on the moment because I look to the stuff that I go through in my life and something always comes out for a reason so I'm doing that. But, its always that when you say something that's just so asinine and so stupid, you're like, ahh, if I could just, please, have an undo button just to not say that.
You see, I know change I see change I embody change All we do is change Yeah, I know change We are born to change We sometimes regard it as a metaphor That reflects the way things ought to be In fact change takes time It exceeds expectations It requires both now and then See, although the players change The song remains the same And the truth is... You gotta have the balls to change
I have never gone into a picture without first studying my characterization from all angles. I make a study of the fellow's life and try to learn everything about him, including the conditions under which he came into this world, his parentage, his environment, his social status, and the things in which he is interested. Then I attempt to get his mental attitude as much as possible.
More and more people are watching entertainment on their phones. On a plane or on a train, or whatever, you see people with their headphones and they're looking at their iPhone or their Galaxy. You're reducing a medium that's meant to be seen on your 65-inch plasma screen at home for your 4-inch monitor on the train. People are ready to do either, and the content has to work on both.
For a while last summer I was depressed because nothing was happening. It got to the point where people like me were getting films, so I decided to focus on stand-up. It kind of saved my life. I hate to be that dramatic, but I got a girlfriend and refocused my life on being more real and living a regular life rather than pursuing this other false goal of television and movie stardom.
As things have progressed and I've gotten older, I've gotten more and more involved on the producing side. It's been a natural progression. The more you become exposed in a particular medium, the more you can bring to the table and people start trusting you. You're valued a little bit more, so you have more of a voice. It's something I would like to do, through the rest of my career.
I think a huge amount of it is because of the Internet. Every single thing in the world is accessible with a few clicks. Almost every child, by the age of 13, has seen pornography. That's clearly different. It used to be really hard or really humiliating, as a 13-year-old, to access pornography. If you wanted to take a look at a Playboy, it was really challenging. Today, it's a joke.
I've always felt that if you back down from a fear, the ghost of that fear never goes away. It diminishes people. So I've always said 'yes' to the thing I'm most scared about. The fear of letting myself down - of saying 'no' to something that I was afraid of and then sitting in my room later going, 'I wish I'd had the guts to say this or that' - that galvanizes me more than anything.
I think one of the things that is important, for me, though a lot of people would disagree with me, is that you be founded in theater so that you understand what an audience is, what kind of an animal it is and how to play with it. How to have fun with it, how to sympathize with it, all the things that an audience is. I don't think you're going to find that out unless you do theater.
Films take too long. There's too much BS, too much nonsense. If I want to do a play, I just call the theater, whether it's here, or in Paris or Mexico or Spain or London or whatever, and say, "I want to do this, are you interested?" They'll answer the next day. With a movie, it's all, "Oh, I see this film as blah blah blah." They don't know what you're talking about, they don't care.
I don't know if this is advice, but I remember this guy in high school who came off like he'd been with a lot of women. He said, "Dude, what girls sometimes like is the unexpected." There were these girls who were always giving him tittie twisters, and he kept warning them, "I'm going to do it back." I'm thinking, There's no way. But sure enough, one girl crossed the line and he did.
Part of the reason I thought that I might do a series is, my dad has pretty much been on the same road to work for years and years. And it's like, "Could I do something like that? Am I so independent that I can't punch the clock at the same place?" So part of it was a kind of exercise. "Can I be responsible in this way?" And lo and behold, I could. Luckily. It'd be bad if I couldn't.
I heard my first laughter on stage, when I was about 10 years old. It was gold pantomime and I remember I was playing Baron Fitznoodle, who was the father of the ugly sisters in "Cinderella." And I walked on and got a great big laugh and I thought that was fantastic, until I looked down and found that my flies were open. And so I always check my flies. I even check my flies on radio.
I want to try to apply my abilities sometimes to make families happy, so I have to make movies at a venue that are not gratuitously violent, that are not using bullets and bloodshed, but are using things like magic and fantasy and enchantment and the imagination. To me that's just all positive stuff. But I am eclectic and I still like to make movies for the midnight audience as well.
It'll be sad not to be Doctor Who anymore because that's an incredible thing to wake up in the morning and go, 'Oh, I'm still Doctor Who!' And you can go and blow up some monsters, and that's how you spend your day. And also when you walk around people don't see Peter anymore, he's not here, it's Doctor Who they see and he gets many more smiles than I do. It'll be sad to say goodbye.
We're so screwed up with our principles. We used to mock Japanese game shows where they ate bugs. Now we're doing the same, if not worse. It's terrifying... It seems the better the quality, the more you're penalised... There are some very good people in television, but a lot of fools running it. They put fame ahead of talent and think someone from 'EastEnders' will put bums on seats.
I am not a romantic leading man anymore so I don't need to nurture that public image anymore. I can talk about it now because I'm not afraid anymore . . . When I grew up, being gay, being sissy or anything like that, was verboten. I disliked myself intensely and feared this part of myself intensely, and had to hide it and became 'Perfect Richard, All-American Boy' as a place to hide.
After Stand By Me came out, people were telling me, 'You're so good,' 'You're going to be a star,' and things like that. You can't think about it. If you take it the wrong way, you can really get high on yourself. People get so lost when that happens to them. They may think they have everything under control, but everything is really out of control. Their lives are totally in pieces.
If you're a fan of it, there's a lot of things that plays into what the fans of the series want. If you've never seen them before, a lot of people who have seen it tell me that it's the most accessible of the three. It's a solid story, by itself, and it's more of a sort of action film. When I was watching Twilight the other day, I realized that you do need to read the book to get it.
I realized that if I went snowboarding, you can't think of anything else when you're snowboarding. You can't hesitate or think about anything other than not falling off and breaking your neck. If you want a holiday where you're not gonna think about work and you're not gonna think about anything, snowboarding is the best way to do it. Or skiing, I guess. I don't ski, so I don't know.
Chicago theater vs. New York theater. There's just nothing to say about it really. If you've seen Chicago theater, you know that the work is true to what is there on the page. It's not trying to present itself with some sort of flashy, concept-based thing. It's about the work, and it's about the acting you're about to watch. So acting-based theater feels like it was born there to me.