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I have four daughters, the eldest is 19, the youngest is 12, and I watched all of them journey into motherhood. Motherhood is very deep. It starts when you're very, very young. Now, my 12 year old comes in, wants to put me to bed. And she'll, you know, put her hand on my forehead and say the prayer with me. As for years I've done for her! It's almost like a very beautiful, natural transition.
I don't want comedy to be Bridesmaids 2. I'm not denigrating Bridesmaids but, enough already, let's stop pretending women are incalculably different to us. Seeking out podcasts, listening on headphones, it's like an intimate, specific conversation. People respond if it feels from the heart. I'm as neurotic a human being as lives, and I have my faults. I'm a drunk. But people really like that.
It's really awful, the rhetoric that's becoming part of the national discourse, but when it has such an ugly headline - that's what activated a group of people that was otherwise complacent to go, "Hey, I'm going down to the airport, and I'm going to hold hands in solidarity around Muslims in the arrival section of the airport." That's why I've made a choice to be so public about my position.
It is not coincidence that makes a designer but his continuity. And continuity means working and searching, working and fighting, working and finding, finding and seeing, seeing and communicating, and again working and searching. Designers must challenge the past, must challenge the present, must challenge the future; but first of all, designers must be true to themselves. Design is attitude.
We are all from different cultures. Heath's [Ledger] Australian, really. I'm from here. Ang's [Lee] from China. But I think Ang gets very close in preproduction and rehearsals. And then he allows his actors - I don't think scared of actors, but I think he's scared of getting in on the scenes he's watching. The space he's watching. So he just totally disconnects from you while you're shooting.
I was desperate to do more TV and film. Because I considered myself to be a theater creature. A theater animal. I was convinced that I was going to be onstage for the rest of my life. Because it's something I can really do. I thought I was pretty good at it, and it's kind of stupid, but I was concerned that people would go, "Oh yeah, he's very good onstage, I'm not sure he can do television."
The look of the movie and the music, which was by Jack Nitzsche, is what really stands out to me. I don't know if the movie succeeds as a political, cultural comment on the times and the war in Vietnam, and the capitalists versus the everyday guy that gets sent off to fight corporate wars. I don't know if the movie ever succeeded in that range. But it was a wonderful part in the Cutter's Way.
The only reason I acted in school was because of the community. I was in the chorus of every play and was never the lead other than one time, but to me it was about the community. I was an English major and my whole goal was to be an English teacher and was lucky enough to get into the playwriting group. The whole experience I had at Brown was eye opening and the most mind-bending experience.
I like to direct movies, but I don't like to goof around for eight years talking about it. And it's pretty irritating to get a movie on. So to complicate it by having more irritation as a director, I don't really need it. And because I direct a great deal still, but in the theater, I kind of get that anyway. Which is not at all to say I would never do it again, or it would never happen again.
I think it [Trouble In Mind] was the only time Divine didn't appear in drag, or certainly one of the few times, anyway. Alan created a time and place that was no time and no place, so it was not identifiable with any particular period or any particular city or any particular country, for that matter. I mean, everybody spoke English, but that was about it. So you couldn't pigeonhole that film.
[Sylvester] Stallone and I were in a meeting for Rocky Balboa. We were laughing about something, and he looks at my mouth and says to the casting director, "Wow, your lip even hooks down like mine does." Then he looked at the casting director and nodded, and I guess that was the nod of saying, "Hire this kid." So yeah, I have a really crooked mouth. They don't work, but I can feel everything.
That's another thing that's depressing: certain attitudes in Congress. They assume that you're dumb; they can take advantage of you being dumb. I find that offensive. It insults our intelligence. They're playing us for dumb and they're being dumb in doing it. But I believe that's gonna change. I think those people, the McConnells, are not helping us at all. They're taking us backward in time.
I used to smoke marijuana. But I'll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening - or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, midevening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early mid-afternoon, or perhaps the late-midafternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning. . . But never at dusk!
Meaning and value depend on human mind space and the commitment of time and energy by very smart people to a creative enterprise. And the time, energy, and brain power of smart, creative people are not abundant. These are the things that are scare, and in some sense they become scarcer as the demand for these talents increases in proportion to the amount of abundant computing power available.
I wouldn't do my roles if I really hated it. I've done things I hated, but I didn't go into them thinking I would hate them. I want to have fun. I don't want to go to work and not enjoy it. So if I'm swirling around on some wires, talking to Fred Flintstone, I make it the funnest I can. I also want to be good at it. I don't want to be a crap cartoon character. I want to be proud I'm a vitamin!
You relax within the verse. You realize the structure of the verse and relax into it. It's like swimming. Or riding a bike. You can't make it sound real if you are thinking it through as you go. You can't think through Shakespeare, you have to speak it. And listen to the rhythm of it and then it takes you over. And to make it sound real you speak as if you believe it. Don't act it. Just be it.
I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful.
My first jobs were at Pixar and John Lasseter just doing animation would always allow actors to do that, and then animate to that. It was an early lesson for me that, if you're lucky enough, as I've been in my career thus far, to get really incredible iconic people to do your stuff, you want them to tell your story and you want them to be on page in the important moments, and they usually are.
I couldn't get a job acting all the time and there were down periods where I could take photographs or paint. I got into a lot of trouble when I was young, from making two films with James Dean, watching him work and then him dying and thinking I could turn down work. There was a big difference, he was a star and I wasn't. So I got in a lot of trouble and was essentially banned from Hollywood.
I think that we all at some point are in search of something - a higher power, whatever you want to call it, the meaning of life. I know I was, especially at even my son's age in my 20s, and dabbling in Eastern philosophies and yoga and Buddhism and Christianity and Islam. I kind of touched them all, you know, just trying to figure out the meaning of life or if nothing else, figure myself out.
I came in on this movie after there had been a director and I came in after Tom Courtenay had talked to Ron Harwood about making a movie. So, you know Tom and Albert Finney had been friends since the beginning of their career as they became stars around the same time - Tom always reminds me that Albert was first with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and then Tom with The Long Distance Runner.
All I wanted to do while I was a teenager was go out and play most of the time and just enjoy life and have fun. I wasn't big into school, you know, I look back now and wish I would have spent more time studying and enjoyed it more. It's not for everyone and I didn't enjoy it that much like going to school and studying - some stuff I did but some of it I didn't. My attention span wasn't there.
I don't know how many days I worked there [on Star Wars]. The thing I do remember was I somehow got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog. It was Jim Henson's space, with this Kermit the Frog sign. I took a photo of it and sent it to my mom with a caption that read, "Look, Mom. I made it. I got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog." I was always fascinated by the film-set infrastructures.
It's kind of interesting to experience that kind of a ride after well, essentially so many years of enjoying a career based on failures and then suddenly something clicks. The weird thing is, I never changed a thing. The process is still the process as it ever was. The fact that people decided to go and see a movie that I was in was probably the most shocking thing that I've ever been through.
The Town Hall Pub on a Wednesday night was just regulars anyway, so we could play whatever. Worst case scenario, it would be the same seven people who were always at the bar getting drunk, and they would be there for us. But we just told our friends and family, and they came out to support us. Then they told their friends, who told their friends, who told their friends. It was a full-on event.
I changed my major to English literature, which was on the advice of my father. I finally said, "You know, Dad, to heck with it: I'm just going to be an actor. But I'm going to go to school." And he said, "Well, if you're going to go to school, then major in English literature. Those are the tools you are going to be working with as a man who's going to be acting in English, one would assume."
If I would had been born years earlier, I would have been in all the Westerns. It's just the way that the industry goes. But now, we are in an age of a lot of different kinds of fears, and you have the science fiction and horror genres doing our morality plays the same way that they would have done in Westerns. I absolutely accept it. In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.
Facing the darkness, admitting the pain, allowing the pain to be pain, is never easy. This is why courage - big-heartedness - is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey. But if we fail to let pain be pain - and our entire patriarchal culture refuses to let this happen - then pain will haunt us in nightmarish ways. We will become pain's victims instead of the healers we might become.
I was diagnosed with an early, early stage of prostate cancer. I was almost a vegetarian then. I was heading that direction. What pushed me over the edge, was the doctor who did the diagnosis. He said in a discussion about prostate cancer that he had never seen a vegetarian with prostate cancer. And this is not a holistic doctor, this is a regular, mainstream doctor. And I was just blown away.
I get inspired with passion, I think. I get inspired by people who are just passionate, and it doesn't matter what they do or what they're passionate about. I just think passion is such an embraceable thing, whether it's the guy in the coffee shop who's making the coffee or a bricklayer who loves making walls. I love watching people who love what they do, and I think that's very inspirational.
A sitcom, you rehearse for four days of the week and then you shoot it all in one night in front of a studio audience. It's like a play every week, you just shoot it over a seven or eight-day period with a single camera. I enjoy this format of show much more. I'm a feature guy. I like making movies. So the four camera thing I didn't love it that much. I found myself slightly out of my element.
It’s such a floating freak show. You get a bit older and you start to see what’s going on backstage in the collective psyche of this ridiculous industry. … Nothing pleases me more than when somebody who was awe-inspired to be working with me realizes I’m just another schmuck that they’re bored of hanging out with on a set. I love that moment. I like it when that persistent illusion is smashed.
I remember when I was a teenager thinking my girlfriend was cheating on me, and going around riling myself up. Pretending to cry. It was totally illegitimate-I actually didn't feel anything. I went to some pub and then went crying all the way home. And I got into my dog's bed. I was crying and holding on to the dog. I woke up in the morning, and the dog was looking at me like, 'You're a fake.'
I think it took us all by surprise. I mean, I knew that people in New Zealand would like [Hunt for the Wilderpeople], but no one really anticipated how much they would embrace it as it is. And it's playing widely in Australia now; they're running it as well. It's going to be interesting to see how it does it in the States, but I think if Sundance was any indication, I imagine it could do well.
I think everybody's goal was to make something that was really broad for a big audience, which was my goal too. But my main goal was that I wanted my audience to love it, because they're the ones who are going to buy it, and they're the ones who are going to tell their friends. And I wanted to make sure that core audience was really happy, because if they all buy it we have a successful movie.
In order to put it into perspective, as an actor, it's super hard to get on a TV show. If you get on one, it's super hard for that show to be reasonably successful. All of that, on paper, seems pretty special. It's the sum of the parts, really. To roll the dice and come up with this particular show is pretty fortunate. I'm very happy about Silicon Valley series. It's changed everything for me.
I have a suspicion, because if you look at the whole, all the [Star Wars ] movies, the backlog of every one of these movies, there's a lot of great stuff, but one might not be not as good with the writing in this or the acting in that or the directing in that, this has great actors, great directors, great script, and I really feel like we're gonna make the best one [movie with Young Han Solo].
I was telling somebody about in grammar school we used to have the duck-and-cover drills where we'd have to go down to a fallout shelter in the basement. We'd sit on our butts on the ground next to the wall with a textbook over our heads and our knees sort of drawn up to our chest. I don't think they still do that. They're sort of sobering. You leave recess and come in for the apocalypse drill.
Wasn't that a wonderful thing that I had a chance to work with more great actors, big stars, than just about anyone in the history of Hollywood? And some days I didn't know with whom I'd be standing face-to-face, and I was so impressed because they were all really wonderful people. And when you work with Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, George Sanders as Mr. Freeze, it's a wonderful experience.
When you're younger, you get scripts that you are too young for and now I'm getting scripts, which I think, "I'm too old for this character." They can always shift things around to make it work and make the ages work. But I'm definitely getting more complex and interesting roles and less what you would expect. So I can experiment more and have a bit more freedom when I'm putting things on tape.
At some time, often when we least expect it, we all have to face overwhelming challenges. When the unthinkable happens, the lighthouse is hope. Once we find it, we must cling to it with absolute determination. When we have hope, we discover powers within ourselves we may have never known- the power to make sacrifices, to endure, to heal, and to love. Once we choose hope, everything is possible.
I'm definitely a frustrated musician, though it's more in terms of wishing I was a better guitar player and songwriter. But I've never regretted becoming an actor instead. I think it's been a more pure form of self-expression for me. I luckily found something that I could aspire to be good at, whereas I never... I think I'd never quite reach that level of artist that I enjoy in the music world.
I'm very political. Because I read politics every day, so I'm familiar with the world. I approach the films is I'm trying to write what is true, so that supersedes partisan spin, in my opinion. I find partisanship is a thing for cable news and newspaper articles, but it's not interesting for art. I think we all believe what we believe, and I don't think a film is going to change someone's mind.
Amy Sedaris [in the Ghost Team] plays a Miss Cleo-esque character - Miss Cleo just died, so that's kind of timely - but she plays a Miss Cleo-esque TV psychic who's also kind of a bullshit artist. One of the most triumphant character turns in the movie is when she realizes that even though she's a bullshit artist, she does have something to offer. She helps save the day at the end of the movie.
I lost my dad back in the fall, and my dad said something to me a long time ago. He said, 'Are you happy with who you are now?' because we just had a real serious talk. And I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'Then you can't regret what got you to where you are. So whatever you do and whatever mistakes you make, learn from them and grow. And just always treat people with kindness,' which I've tried to do.
There's this exhausting energy from you getting your lines out and your words right, especially if it's a complicated scene. And as soon as the camera is off you and goes on the other person, you're talking garbled garbage and you feel so sorry for them because you've lost the will to live, after 18 hours of saying those lines. That's terribly unfair. So, I do love the quick-paced nature of it.
When I do a film, the days before or the night before, I throw up. Sometimes it's just in my mouth and I swallow it back, but sometimes it's real. Whatever it is, it's hard. I don't do the first five or ten minutes of my character's appearance in a movie until the middle of the shooting schedule because I don't want him to be defined by my nervousness. So, we do the middle of the picture first.
I think one of the things you have to be aware of as an actor is that if you come on the set and see the director standing there mouthing all the words while a scene is going on, that's usually a very bad sign because it means the director has already shot the scene in his head. He knows exactly the rhythm and the nuances that he wants delivered in the line and you're not going to dissuade him.
I would just say that I could share what served me, which was trying to find the best material that I could possibly find and make it better. When other celebrities and sports stars, or people that are successful in another area, cross over into movies, they're always encouraged to bring that same tenacity and that same relentless drive that you had to make it. You have to apply that to acting.
If people work together, if they can keep a cooperative spirit and use their ingenuity and balance it all with good humor and good will, then there's nothing to be afraid of. That's the sappy part of it, ... On the other hand, every Halloween for many years when my kids were trick-or-treating I would put on my 'Ghostbusters' jumpsuit with a police flashlight to protect all the kids from ghosts.