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Quotes
I've done an absurdly commercial cartoon and now I'm more likely to
hired for a job I couldn't get hired for before, because I hadn't done
enough movies. It's so rare when an actor gets hired because he's right
for the role - it just doesn't figure into it. - Upon playing Batman:
The only time it's ever like work is when you don't like what you've
done.
I was going to movies and watching TV, going to the theater a little
bit. It was, like, 'Wow, you could make a living doing this? Great! What
could be better?' There isn't anything I could choose better. - On why
he initially choose acting as a career while still a young man.
Being successful doesn't change things. There's a painful, lonely part
of acting because you're always waiting. The thing about being a
performer is doing, and when you have to wait, it's the same pain as
when you're starting out and have no job. You think that thing will go
away, but it doesn't. It just shifts. I remember Robert Duvall saying
that being a successful actor is all about finding interesting hobbies,
because if you don't have the right hobby, you die. It's very hard to
maintain interest. Most actors don't. They become a little cliched. You
learn how to do tricks and stuff.
It's always been the same for me. I've always enjoyed acting, and I
really love good actors; they're such unique characters. I wish I could
tell stories well, or tell a joke. Any time someone can do that it's so
satisfying. Sean Penn, for instance, is a really good actor, and he can
tell a good joke or story. But it's hard to do. Most actors have special
talents that make them attractive, but they're often odd characters.
He was basically a nerd, and he really had wonderful qualities. I've
never really played a hustler before, but he was absolutely a
world-class hustler. A liar lies and a thief steals from you, but a
hustler gives you something that you don't mind parting with your money
for. You're entertained by the meal or the sex or the impression that
something is going to happen. You're given a sense of well-being, and he
was good at it. - On his character John Holmes for the movie Wonderland.
I think John Holmes is one of the first twenty or fifty people that
fulfilled Andy Warhol's prophecy that one day everyone would be famous
for fifteen minutes. People who had nothing to do with pornography, or
had any interest in it, knew who John Holmes was. And somehow it was
famous, at least in LA, that Canoga Park was the pornography center of
the planet. I still don't know why, but I knew that as a kid.
I'm very lucky in that I haven't cultivated fame. Which, from what I've
seen of my contemporaries, takes an enormous amount of time. I have a
lot of respect for people that do it and they're successful at it ...
Especially people that aren't such talented actors.
Interesting characters are troubled characters. The only problem I've
had in my business is very few people - unfortunately, very vocal -
confusing the difficult role that I play with me. I play these guys, but
I'm not like them. I've been accused of being difficult to work with.
But that's like saying the football player's out of breath 'cause when
he comes off the field having caught a hundred-yard pass he shouldn't be
out of breath. He's not out of shape; he just went and did his job.
I've done a lot of jobs that were just for money or were just the best
things around at the time.
Being called Jim made it easier for Oliver (Stone) and probably for me.
In the end that approach was healthy because I don't believe you've got
to go out and shoot dope to play Jim Morrison. - On if the rumors were
true about Kilmer insisting on being called Jim Morrison while filming
The Doors.
Acting is not a science. Anybody who believes that their success exists
in relation to their goals is deluding themselves; unless you think of a
career in terms of financial goals. I have nothing against Tom Cruise,
but he must have a large capacity to deal with the business side of
movies.
There are only three reasons to do a movie: the cast, the director, the
role. Like I say, you live in a minute of screen time, but to prepare
for the minute takes much more than a day. You'd better be excited about
what those moments are, even if they're the hardest moments. Or the
smallest.
It's the most fulfilling thing I can do and get paid for. - On theatre.
I feel safer in Johannesburg than in L.A. Violence comes out of the blue
here. I've had friends who have been carjacked, all kinds of things.
Successful felons, criminals love L.A. It's so big, there's so many
freeways to get on after you do your score. Because of its
possibilities, L.A.'s the most sorrowful city in the world.
I was given a copy of that script because at one point I was involved
with Dune. It would have been my first job for damn near a year. So,
Dave (Lynch) gave me the script and it was straight-out, hard-core
pornography before page 30. I never finished it. I said, 'Good luck, but
I can't do this.' It isn't what he ended up making. THAT movie, I WOULD
have done. - On why he turned down David Lynch's Blue Velvet.
It may or may not sound pretentious. But I've turned down, consciously
and specifically, many jobs I knew would have been pretty surfire way to
go about making a lot of money, being recognized and gaining power in
the industry.
Nothing's ever guaranteed. It's all math, like, 'This guy has better
numbers, so give the job to him.' If the business people think they can
make money with you, it's not, like, a deep conversation that they have
about you. Actors can get into a rhythm of working where the confidence
[about them] is like the stock market. Someone 'feels' good, so they pay
whatever, which gives other studios confidence, like 'Those guys have
good taste, they hired him,' so whether he or she is any good, you can
do four or five jobs like that until you're discovered. This town is
filled with mystery careers -- people who aren't discovered found out,
and they keep giving money to them. - On having a successful acting
career.
Every day was such a trial. It was a unique kind of hell. All the
audience knows is the end result - and that's as it should be., but the
experience of making it is quite different. - On filming Tombstone.
I'd be in a bad Western on a good horse any day of the week. It's such a
fantastic genre of film.
Poetry is a very subjective and intimate expression. It's literally your
heartbeat. Your rhythm. The song of your soul. It's superconcentrated.
It's a dense piece of yourself.
Parts. Little people are very funny. They already know that life is
weird. So that part was fun. My co-star, I ended up marrying - that was
fun. We went to New Zealand and we went to Wales. All the travelling was
fun but wearing the pink dress wasn't fun. - On if filming Willow was
fun.
It looked like it might not work out with Michael Keaton, so they asked
Joel Schumacher, 'Who do you want for Batman?' When he said me, I asked
my agent, 'Why? Who did they not get?' I'd met with Joel a couple of
times before about other [movies]. I didn't know anything in terms of
the cast, story or anything, but I said, 'Sure, sounds like fun.' - On
accepting his role as Batman.
I think spiritual perception comes from natural and healthy relationship
to the land and I've had that. I get an easy, automatic sense of myself
in nature, a wholeness and I feel nowhere else. I think people should
live where praying is most immediate. That's why I live in New Mexico.
The physical terrain, the feeling, the environment and culture improve
my life just by waking up there.
When I figured out that to have money you had to work, I knew I couldn't
hack a regular job. So I thought acting would be good, because basically
you made your own hours, were ridiculously overpaid and got the girls.
Don't laugh! That was the truth! - On how he first came about considered
acting as a career.
Doing my first movie, I realized I could get into real bad habits. If
you're the star, all you have to do is show up, and 20 people say, 'Do
you want anything" What is it? Let me get it for you.' Believe me,
you get spoiled very quickly. I saw some of my contemporaries allow
themselves to have that fame, thinking they could handle it. It messed
them up.
I liked being Doc Holliday. It's fun to be insightful and aristocratic,
to stand up for your friend and make sacrifices for him. It was fun to
be arrogant like he was and have the goods to back it up. He was a very
noble character. Although, let's not forget, he did kill a lot of
people. - On Tombstone.
It made me consider time differently, because my year ends when the year
ends. I blame my birth date for being hung up about time."- On his
New Year's Eve birthday.
It's probably fair to say I have taken myself too seriously on some
jobs. I'm sure I'm more guilty of being difficult than I'd like to
remember. I don't regret my desires; I've regretted the way I would
communicate my desires. Maybe I've lost a job because of some rumor, I
doubt it. But nobody good that I've worked with has ever said anything
negative about me, because we've never had a negative experience. By
good, I mean directors who do their homework, people that are
passionate, crazy, never sleep, and do like I do and just go after it.
When they decide they want to expand their repertoire of facial
expressions, say, play a character part, or do a period piece, it's
often their fate, tragically, that they fail. Few actors have learned
about acting by doing successful movies. Tom Cruise has, and Tom Hanks.
- On mainstream box-office actors.
For my audition, I did a monologue from one of my plays. I couldn't find
anything contemporary that they wouldn't have seen hundreds of times
before. I didn't know what I was doing, but it worked. - On his
Juilliard audition.
I guess I'm one of the new generation of actors who have as little to do
with the machinery of Hollywood as possible. We're colonizing whole
chunks of cowboy territory; I never liked LA when I was growing up there
as a kid, and I don't like it now. I've got my visits to that city down
to a science: I make some people get up early, other stay up late -- and
I can be in and out in a day.
I listened to a lot of records. I smoked quite a few cigarettes and that
- the smoking - stayed with me unfortunately! And I copied his voice in
much the same way as I would learn an accent. With a lot of work, I got
it. I found Jim's voice. Whenever people see me singing, it's really me
singing. It's live. Oliver (Stone) was counting a lot on the spontaneity
and the authenticity, especially in the concert scenes. Everything was
prerecorded just in case but I ended up performing it all live. It is
all a thing of imagination and one can have the tendency to
underestimate it. Physically, I enjoyed myself a lot when I had to gain
wait to incarnate Jim Morrison at the end of his life. When he is in a
stupor, intoxicated by alcohol and drugs, he resembles Karl Marx. The
make-up artists took Polaroids and showed them to the Doors guitarist
and to Alan Ronay to get their approval. They were amazed by the
resemblance and that helped me a lot. - On becoming Jim Morrison for The
Doors.
My only challenge is to entertain. And I accomplish my task better when
I myself am entertained by what I am doing. I am very critical of
myself, I constantly set the bar higher and higher. I try to surpass
myself. That's all. But I also know how to preserve myself, to not let
myself get bedazzled by the smoke and mirrors.
New Mexico is my home. It has never been anything but home. The ranch
has rivers and canyon, everything imaginable. I can ride, hunt and fish.
At the same time, ranching is grueling, difficult work. It's like
acting, to be successful at it, you have to work hard. I take it very
seriously.
The trick to being a good actor is getting so involved in your character
that the camera disappears, the 50 bored guys eating doughnuts
disappear, friends disappear. To get to that point when you don't have
to think about it, you're just acting and reacting in those
circumstances.
I probably complained more when I was younger. The movie industry can be
frustrating but I think sometimes I could have been more helpful,
approaching a film as a partnership rather than being critical of a
director's ignorance. I wasn't sensitive to the fact that it's very hard
to direct.
Big movies are fun and it's great to fly on private jets and make a lot
of money and all the things that are connected with Hollywood, but they
take a lot of your own life.
There are some directors I should have worked with. I'd like to have
worked with (Robert) Altman - I turned him down a couple of times when I
was younger. My thing now is if it's a good director I'll never say no -
I'm just gonna say yes from now on.
It hurts. I miss my kids. I miss my kids in so many ways that I can't
explain.
I thought I was going to marry my last girlfriend, she was just so
wonderful. Daryl Hannah, fantastic woman. We shared so many interests,
and we really made each other laugh...she just fascinated me. But
there's something fundamentally where we didn't...maybe almost like
brother and sister, just so alike, that it couldn't... - Brentwood
Magazine, October 2003
It's great. Instead of going out to parties, I go home to my family. -
Prior to his divorce from Joanne Whalley
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