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A war film can be propaganda and they're very valuable as propaganda, as we realized in Britain in the Second World War. Film as propaganda is a very valuable tool. It can also demonize, which is the dangerous side of a war film as propaganda. But there are war films that are not propaganda. It's just saying 'This is what it's like.' For 99 percent of us we don't know what it's like. We have no idea. So to reveal that to the audience is powerful.
Advice to rock gods: drugwise, stick to Ibuprofen, decaf lattes, and pale Pilsners ... If your stomach is not a flat slab, please leave your shirt on while performing ... If your girlfriend asks you to choose between her and your music, sell your instruments immediately - especially if you're a drummer ... Finally, go easy on the supermodels, don't forget to tune, and remember: a tiny bit of dry ice and lasers goes a long way. Ditto with tattoos.
Being a senior in high school means you're not only getting closer to adulthood, but also ready to start thinking about your dreams and aspirations, whether that's applying for college, joining the military, or seeing the world. It's never too early to start thinking of your future, so use these high school senior year quotes about following dreams to inspire yourself and those around. Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today.
I remember I used to go to The Laugh Factory and just goof off onstage, and then I'd see Dane Cook. He did a bit about his Mom making the bed in the summertime when he was a kid. He just said "Vroom!" and threw the sheet up in the air and the sheet would just stay over the bed for like a minute and a half. All he had were his arms out, but I could see the sheet. And he didn't do anything. He just kept it there. And I went, "I have to write more."
To be an actor and a director, I actually felt it helped me tremendously to be in the scenes of The Hollars, because as you can see, they're very intimate, very intense scenes. You don't want to break the actor's character and you don't want to break their momentum, so as the actor, I tried not to call cut as much as I could, and almost make it feel like a play, just set this environment where these amazing actors could do what they wanted to do.
I do feel that scripts get developed now to a point where they're sort of actor-proof. If the actor is not very good, the narrative still survives because it's all in the dialogue. Not to say there aren't great performances in English-language films, because there are every year, but the 1970s were awash with great performances, and I was wondering whether it had to do with the amount of space and the amount of responsibility given to the actors.
If you find a girl who reads, keeps her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea (coffee) and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She'll talk as if the characters in the book are real because, for a while, they always are. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable.
As a people, we value family, education and success. Hunger is an enemy to all three. Scientific studies have demonstrated that even brief periods of hunger can permanently inhibit a child's mental, emotional and physical growth. Kids who are hungry do poorly in school and are unlikely to grow into productive adults. For families, experiencing hunger means living in a world of isolation and shame. Caring citizens must put an end to this disgrace.
But when you are doing an animated voice, it has to have more energy than usual or it falls flat and doesn't work. For myself, I found that I had to put myself in the same physical or emotional state as Sid, in order to make that voice sound alive and authentic. So if there was a scene in which he was running, I would be running beforehand to sound out of breath. That's important because the audience can tell intuitively if it does not sound real.
I know there were periods of times where I didn't feel understood, and there were very few people around me that I felt like they really got me. There was one person who was sort of the one in my life that really got me.In general, I felt a little bit on the outside and not totally included. There was a period of time when we were moving around a lot. So I couldn't really hold on to a certain set of friends. And so that was a little bit difficult.
There are wonderful low-interest loans you can take out to own your own solar and cut your energy bills down drastically. You can retrofit your home to become more energy efficient with on-bill financing, where the upgrades you make pay for themselves with the energy savings you generate. Ten years ago, there were only a few electric vehicles on the market, and today there are many, many more coming, and with each year the cost of them comes down.
The first thing that always pops into my head regarding our president, is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him... They just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white - very white; American, Kansas, middle of America. There is no argument about who he is, or what he is. America's first black president hasn't arisen yet. He's not America's first black president. He's America's first mixed-race president.
Before my commercial career, I never played for more than an audience of 99 seats somewhere in downtown New York, but occasionally someone would recognize me in the subway and say, "Oh, I saw you in that play, you were really great in that," or "the director was really something." It becomes a conversation. When people spot me on the street from my work in commercials, there's nowhere for the conversation to go. Obviously I'm an actor and I can't.
I think if the content is good and the content is interesting, the at home viewer will watch it for as long as the story is interesting thus the responsibility for making the story interesting falls on the shoulders of the reporter or the producer. Then I'm disappointed that producers have felt that television can only be told in 59 second story bursts because we've become, it's become journalism based on MTV, video electronic editing and cutting.
The reason I live in America is because I mean literally every six or seven years I've done something in England. The last lead I had in an English film I did was 1998. So that's why I live here. It's because I get more work. I'll travel back for radio, you know what I mean. I've just got to consider myself to be living in the middle of the ocean, and that way I have a really nice career, if I'm prepared to do television, radio, theater, and film.
All you have to do is speak up. Tell him straight up: "I need you here to protect and provide for us, to give us security in our lives, to help raise these children, to set an example for this boy, who needs to see what real men do, and for this girl, who needs to know what a real man is so she can find one of her own someday. I need you to be the head of this family." Lay it out like this, and your requirements will trump his mother's every time.
My step-dad started playing hockey in Detroit so we moved and I had to start home school. I started watching movies since I had a bunch of free time and then I was like, 'You know what? I want to give this a shot, move back to L.A., and audition.' The first show I booked was a show called Threshold with Carla Gugino and it was obviously a terrifying experience and I felt out of my comfort zone, but it made me want to keep going because it was fun.
I think we all understand disappointing yourself. Especially in the acting profession, which is probably similar to a political career, even the most stable, head-on-straight person is still going to be confronted with doing something that they shouldn't, that could affect their job or cause them not to be at their best - even if it's something as simple as taking a red eye for an audition at 6 a.m. the next morning and you know you'll be dragging.
People know that both my parents were shrinks so I was sort of raised in an atmosphere where there was that interest in the human mechanism and the human psyche and what makes people tick. And yes, I think I'm particularly creative and adventurous and improvisational and spontaneous in my inner impulses and patterns and deeply curious and appetized in the unfathomably mysterious and delicious phenomena that is the human being and who we really are.
I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role.
The thing in comedy is that once you start worrying about something not succeeding, you're frozen. There's no verdict on anything. You can make ¡Three Amigos!, and some people will at the time say, "Oh, that's too silly." Then five years later, silly is hip. Now it's considered art. I never comment on anything I do, because if I say anything negative about X film, or X TV show, or X project, people who saw it and loved it go, "Well, am I an idiot?"
Oh, she's my bodyguard. I mean, I'm a married man, and the last thing you need in that situation is to be considered a sexy individual. But I try to never let this whole McDreamy thing really influence us. I'm trying to just have a calm family life, to make my marriage work. It's not as if when my wife asks me to take out the trash, I say, 'Um, honey, don't you realize that I'm too sexy for that'? Well, actually, I do, but she gives me crap for it.
If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're as a filmmaker really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart. That's what people will do, people will naturally tear stuff apart because they're trapped with it, they paid money for it. And they came into it wanting to love it. So all you can really do is piss off the audience. Unless you do things right.
Here I was in Estonia, doing a concert for 5,000 people, and not many people know the song My Way - Gorbachev in the 80s, My Way had just become a famous song, and [Mikhail] Gorbachev in a satirical, kind of cynical manner coined the term the Sinatra Doctrine and My Way was the song because the Baltic states in the Warsaw Pact wanted to go their own way and secede from the Soviet Union, so joking he says," Yeah, we've got the Sinatra Doctrine now."
What I'm really involved in when I'm writing is something that no one ever mentions when they see any play. Writing is like trying to make gunpowder out of chemicals. You have these words and sentences and the strange meanings and associations that are attached to the words and sentences, and you're somehow cooking these things all up so that they suddenly explode and have a powerful effect. That's what absorbs me from day to day in writing a play.
Gratitude based on a faith that everything that happens or doesn’t happen in your life is for your own best interests. That we live in a purposeful universe. Life is always for you; it is never against you. It is a fact that blessings sometimes come wrapped in fear, pain, and tears. In choosing to practice unconditional gratitude you are choosing to trust the process, to honor your feelings and to place your faith in an outcome of inevitable grace.
I existed before Star Trek. I started in live television. I was there when the cameras were as big as a table, had internal fans that were whirring and tubes that, because of the heat, had to come right up to our face for a close-up. Now, we are talking about green screen and putting us in locations that we'll never visit. What has happened to us is a miracle, and the miracle is our inventiveness. The tragedy of our lives is also our inventiveness.
Zoe Saldana is such an angel. She’s got such an openness and vulnerability on camera and yet such great strength. She can kick ass with the best of them, but then she can soften and open up in a way that is magnetizing whether you’re watching her on set or on screen – she’s got a real power to her. I love her; we’ve known each other for years and it’s great to come back to that kind of familiarity, especially when you’re working with such intimacy.
Certainly as actors, and maybe as directors, you've got to hang on to something childlike. You've got to know what play is. I haven't worked with Mike Leigh, but I know him very well and there's something open in his eyes about what's in front of him. And the same is true of Alfonso in a Mexican, mad way. There's an enthusiastic response to something. Neil Jordan, the same, when he gets excited . You just want to know there's a human being in there.
Well, you know, I do think in the larger span of things, I owe it all to Star Trek, because Star Trek has given me this pop icon status if you will, and one of the gifts have been this megaphone I have which amplifies my voice and I can reach people. And I do think the movement for equality for LGBT Americans is in the same context of all of the great American movements, you know, the basic fundamental ideals of this country of justice and equality.
Many times - especially when I'm playing an historical character - I want to be really on target with how I create that character and really nuanced with who that human being might be. But I don't want to lose the likeness of me or the depth of my own personality. So meditation and my spirituality has helped me to realize that, yes, I want to get out of the way but I also want the ability to hold on to what the audience likes of what they see of me.
I love a good wool suit, and I appreciate the fact that it's a natural fiber. I know where it comes from, and I know how it's bred. And it's built to last. It breathes and it feels good. A lot of my climbing and hiking gear is all wool, because I can wear it for a week straight and it doesn't smell. And when you get hot and sweaty in a cold temperature, it stays warm. So your body temperature stays at a good warmth rather than freezing your ass off.
We would do improvisation together. And that in a way, had almost a "student-film side" where we'd be sitting there with Robert Downey and Jon Favreau and we're playing around, we're jamming around and we read those pages and in next couple of days that's what we do, so it was a good experience. Kind of frightening at first because you didn't quite know how it was going to work out, but they had some very talented people there so it worked out well.
Ultimately your job as an actor is to perform however you're being asked to perform and there's many different procedures as an actor that you're going to run into that you should be prepared for and be ready to go to work and do the best you can and give the director the best thing you can to hopefully give him things on that day that could be shot preserved and out into a canned, then when they go into the editing room that's where a movie's made.
I was very sensitized for what went on inside of the East Germans. Obviously, the first thing was that they were happy that they were experiencing democracy now, and having the freedom to go wherever and express your thoughts without being threatened. So, that's something they are deeply thankful for, I'm sure, but the problem was that no one asked anything. The West just went, "Then you must be happy now, God, what a horrible life you must've had!"
Originally I had a block about appearing in a musical. I went to a voice teacher for a while, but that did no good. My range is about one and a half notes. I ended up talking the musical numbers, which was revolutionary at the time. The lyrics are extremely intricate. They move along like a precisely acted scene. If you miss a word - heaven help you - the orchestra rattles past like an express train, and you've got to run like the devil to catch up.
My career has suddenly started to be the one that I'd always wanted, not in terms of level of success, but in terms of - and this is what I've been banging on about - playing different parts in different media. I was very frustrated, in a physical sense, by people seeing me in a way that I wasn't. And I was beginning to find myself boxed into a corner. Hopefully things have loosed up a bit, and I've gotten better and become more relaxed as an actor.
Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!
The time is a thing; you don't have so much time. A good trick is to try and think about a way to use material from one occupation for the other. It's like going through working a day job, this is so dumb to say, but you know how Julian Schnabel made those crockery paintings while he was working as a short-order cook? It's like that, using what is around, transforming that to create meaning and make art. Trying to take nothing and make... something.
I don't have any expectations about my films. If they're good, they're good - if they're not, they're not. About 10 years ago, I remember going to see one of my movies - I can't even remember which one now - and everyone was jumping up and down, getting excited, saying what a great film it was going to be. We all went in and watched it, and it was the slowest movie I've ever seen. The next day, the reviews were terrible and half the studio was fired.
After directing awhile, you get an instinct about it, but you have to be able to trust your own feelings. Invariably, two-thirds of the way through a film, you say, "Jeezus, is this a pile of crap! What did I ever see in it in the first place?" You have to shut off your brain and forge ahead, because by that time you're getting so brainwashed. Once I commit myself to a film I commit myself to that ending, whatever the motivations and conclusions are.
If you don't practice for three days, everyone will notice." It's something you have to really maintain. So unfortunately, I don't play it that often but I may take it up again. If you don't play for a while, you just can't hit the notes. It's like going to the gym. If you go and do weights, you can lift x amount of weight and if you don't go for ages, you've gotta start again and start from the beginning. So it's a bit like that. It's just a muscle.
The first White House Correspondents' Dinner that we went to as a cast of the West Wing , Barack Obama wanted to meet us beforehand. We were all in this room at the hotel and when the President came in, Martin bowed. Like, a royal bow to the President. And the President did the same thing back to him! It was one of the coolest moments ever to see the President, the leader of the free world, come in and bow right back to Martin Sheen with a big smile.
Want know how I got these scars? My father was a drinker and a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn't like that. Not one bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it. He turns to me, and he says, 'why so serious?' He comes at me with the knife. 'Why so serious?!'. He sticks the blade in my mouth. 'Let's put a smile on that face!' And why so serious?
I don't think there's anything on this planet that more trumpets life that the sunflower. For me that's because of the reason behind its name. Not because it looks like the sun but because it follows the sun. During the course of the day, the head tracks the journey of the sun across the sky. A satellite dish for sunshine. Wherever light is, no matter how weak, these flowers will find it. And that's such an admirable thing. And such a lesson in life.
I asked each if [Yao Xingtong and Zhang Lanxin] was afraid of heights. Each said no, and although they had never had the action movie experience they were willing to be trained. Then I asked if they could swim, and each said yes, but she (gestures toward YX) is better. She said, I can also dive, in fact I once won a diving championship in an international competition. Then she said, "But big brother, I'm not very strong," and I said that's all right.
I did always want to write. And then, when I left New York, where I was working very steadily in the theater - I had done three Broadway shows in a row and was a bit burnt out - I moved out to L.A. and I was not working very much. I came in cold and I'd work for a week, but then I'd have a month or two off. I thought, "I'm going to go crazy unless I actually do write." Like a lot of things in life, it was a situation that came about by circumstances.
Two of my favorite artists are Josh Smith and Joe Bradley. But I argued against them for years, until I grew to love them and felt stupid for my immediate reaction towards their work. Now, I wouldn't be happier than to simply be their friend and to talk to them about what got them making art that was years ahead of my understanding. I never went to school for art or was told what to like or when. So every day is a learning process, like most of life.
I never really took into account the number of homeless families. As a kid, we used to feed the hungry at my church every other Saturday, and one day this kid from my school was there. Somewhere between that moment of realization and appreciation for what my Dad sacrificed for us to have, and me becoming "Anthony Mackie" I lost it. This movie [Shelter] really made me realize that, and it was very humbling and very sickening to see that within myself.
I was raised to think about philosophy and religious thought and the soul and the spirit of humankind in a different way, also really socially progressive teachings of the Baha'i faith, the equality of men and women, the elimination of racial prejudice, the equality of science and religion, so it was a big cauldron of big ideas in my household. And we were weird and unhappy family, but nonetheless that was a really positive thing that came out of it.