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Quotes
Hollywood is much more creatively corrupt than it is economically
[corrupt]. It takes $1 for them to kill their dreams. Their dreams are
worth more than $1.
I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned, except my
family, and it was so liberating. I didn't have a bad moment about it.
It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things. I wonder if
there should be some kind of anarchy.
I can never get ahead of the game because of the movies I do.
1 think, you know, if the right project kind of came
along that I would be able to direct, I would love to do that.
At
this stage, what would be rewarding would be for audiences to want to
watch.
But
I'm never again going to do a movie as an actor where I'm enjoying
myself. It's not fun, and it doesn't have to be.
Child-rearing
is my main interest now. I'm a hands-on father.
Directing
is the ultimate job of an appreciator.
Directors
like Alejandro come along very rarely, and you're very lucky if you
stumble across one in your life as an actor.
I
appreciate words, and I appreciate acting, so combining those elements
into a film is the ultimate act of appreciation.
I
don't have any particular excitement about working with any specific
director or actor at this point.
I
like to believe that love is a reciprocal thing, that it can't really be
felt, truly, by one.
I
love acting, truly my favorite people are actors.
I
really love to make movies.
I
start to giggle the minute that Gary Shandling walks in a room, so I'm
going to have to say Gary was the funniest.
I
think it's much more important to direct movies but if it's going to
take five years between each one then I'll have to make up for that.
I
think life's an irrational obsession.
I
think that any time you really concentrate, there's a certain amount of
adrenaline rush, yeah.
I
think that I've still not been successful at playing the role of the
retired actor, and I'd like to work on that.
I
think that people like the Howard Sterns, the Bill O'Reillys and to a
lesser degree the bin Ladens of the world are making a horrible
contribution.
I
think that you become a bit enlightened to the concerns of the
filmmaking process more when you direct.
I
think we all have light and dark inside us.
I
think you start to prepare the minute you read something.
I
wanted to come to Iraq and see Iraqi faces - children, adults,
diplomats, anybody that implies - and go home with some impressions that
will not let me off the hook. . . . It's not abstract anymore.
I'm
a little bit computer illiterate.
I'm
not a breakfast eater.
I've
never really been one to get what they call stage fright so much.
If
I win the lottery, I'm gonna direct three to four pictures every four to
five years, instead of one - and there won't be time to act.
If
there's anything disgusting in the movie business, it is the whoredom of
my peers.
If
you're willing to put two thoughts into a picture then you're already
ahead of the game.
In
between, I go broke because I seem to do movies where you're not paid a
lot as an actor.
It
has nothing to do with the emotional demands of a role; I've done
comedies that are as draining to me as any drama.
It
varies from role to role and the type of the piece and the people you're
working with. All those factors contribute to how you function on a
movie.
Love
is a mess, at best, and I figure it can be very real in spite of all the
things people try to attach to it.
Marriage
ain't easy, but it's great most of the time.
My
daughter is changing so rapidly now that her likes are different every
day, and I love being involved with that.
My
favorite thing to do is not act - it's that simple.
Oh,
I'm a big-mouth. I said a lot of things.
On
any movie I'm involved with, I say what I think.
Once
in a while, one of these Hollywood-Hollywood movies works like the old
ones did.
Sacrificing
American soldiers or innocent civilians in an unprecedented preemptive
attack on a separate sovereign nation may well prove itself a most
temporary medicine.
So
if we have anything original to offer, it's to speak from our own life
about the society we're in.
So,
if you're an artist who is in it just for the money, I would be against
you.
Somewhere
along the line, the actions of this government are the actions of me.
That
on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it's pure, it
means that they do too.
The
bottom line is, you love your wife, you do your best with that.
The
first role was something on stage and it was 20-something years ago.
There
are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my
$7 at the theatre watching their movies.
There
is no re-inventing the wheel.
There's
a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being
ignored or discouraged.
There's
not a lot of good movies being made.
There's
the death penalty as society deals with it and legislates it, and I'm
against it.
There've
been a couple of times when I've gotten the offer to do the odd one
that'll make the bank big forever.
To
look at the world as it is now, without recognising and acknowledging
that there is a gigantic bearer of revenge and redemption, would be
criminal on behalf of a filmmaker.
Well,
I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the
two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for
you.
Well,
look at all of these summer blockbusters. You can't help but laugh a
little, because you've already seen a lot of these movies 482 times.
Well,
outside of the excitement of being able to participate in anything with
somebody like Terry Malick who I have a great admiration for, was diving
the Great Barrier Reef on the weekend.
What
happens is things come to you - director, script - and if you respond to
it, it's because it's tapping into some part of what's inside you, and
different roles tap into different parts.
Whenever
I've been on the other side of the law, as it were, I've never conspired
to do malice toward somebody, so I didn't feel like now the shoe was on
the other foot or anything like that.
Yeah,
I had a tremendous time shooting in Nebraska. I like that state a lot,
all over it.
Yeah,
I had actually tried to stop acting before I made Dead Man Walking.
You
can't get paid $20 million for the kind of movies I want to do,
You
try to do your best at what you're getting paid for.
You build a cage based on your sense of the truth and your sense of the
aspects of the character that need to tell the story. If you've done
your job right, which I've had varying degrees of success doing at
different times in my life, then you're able to function very freely
within that cage.
Discussing Oliver Stone: I think that his basic pig nature keeps him
from doing the best of what he ought to do. And it keeps him from being
someone I want to run into.
I was brought up in a country that relished fear-based religion, corrupt
government, and an entire white population living on stolen property
that they murdered for and that is passed on from generation to
generation.
The major studios are by and large banks and they give you what is by
and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back
plus.
E.L. Doctorow had a quote I've used a lot of times, that the
responsibility of the artist is to know the time in which he lives.
I think it's really important to be able to feel your own life, and I
had felt so numbed by what had been a kind of surreal saturation of what
was going on in the Middle East, and what it was going to mean,
particularly relative to my kids' future and things like that.
Your life is what you bring to any story. This is a life craft. It's
'How do you feel? Who are you? What do you have to say?'
The horror of the Academy Awards is what the press does leading up to it
to make it a popular TV show. Where they'll actually make it like it's
an arm- wrestling event between two actors. That becomes very petty, and
that's something that's embarrassing to follow up with accepting the
invitation to the party.
I've always operated under the notion that audiences don't always know
when they're being lied to, but that they always know when they're being
told the truth. And if there are what I think are unsung truths to be
talked about in a film -- through a character, through a story -- and
that dominates the piece, that's the key for me. I think the biggest
thing is to not participate in the damaging, lying cinema.
I don't consider myself specifically political, you know? I think of
working as an actor as being a human thing. The concerns I have that
fall into politics are human concerns.
But the bigger issue is that it's an absolutely stupid notion that you
should take the title of someone's profession and attach it to what they
should not do. It has nothing to do with citizenry.
There's an interesting parallel between Bush and Richard Nixon. While
Nixon was clearly a superior statesman and in many ways a more
intelligent politician, what they share is a kind of boldness in how
they emote their insecurities. What we're finding with George Bush -
part of what's familiar to people and that adds to his likability for
many - is that there's a commonality of deep insecurity and his handling
it with a kind of bravado. What they both did is handle things with a
similar certainty - certainty being the "disease of kings."
If the primary statement of the film is that if you have good abs it's
OK to kill people, I pass.
Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He's more like a performer.
She was in the process of becoming the biggest star in the world. I just
wanted to make my films and hide. I was an angry young man. I had a lot
demons and don't really know who could've lived with me at the time. I
was just as badly behaved as her, so I can't point the finger of blame.
[On his marriage to Madonna]
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