Sometimes you’re fighting corporations and forget that people can talk to each other.
Any project that I find encouraging that isn’t attached to a studio, I can go to them, which I definitely would. You have to take an interest in what you do.
I want to be interesting in an interview just as much as I want to do well in a part.
Responsibilities are relative. My responsibility is to a character in a script, to a part I’m playing.
It’s so funny when people who are not used to making movies get into it. You just can’t believe how insufferably boring it is. Waiting around and doing these lines over and over and finally having to go in and loop the lines and dub them.
The play is the source, it is orchestrated with words. In a movie, you are not dealing with as much as that. There are machines and wires. When you’re acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back.
When you perform with a live audience, the audience comes back to you, so that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It’s an extraordinary thing. It’s wild turf up there.
The thing that can get you a little upset is when people say other people are better than you. That can bug you.
Great directors can understand the staging in such a way that can make a scene come alive. Others have a certain way of pacing the scene.
I went back to the stage because it was my way of dealing with the success I had, my way of coping. It was a way of escaping the responsibilty of what was happening.
An actor basically likes to be asked to do something, no matter what position he’s in. It feels more natural. Sitting and waiting is more gratifying.
Women have always had equal importance onstage, and working with them must have altered my sensibilities. I’ve never felt sensitive to the whole issue, because being macho has never been a problem with me.
Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.
There was a time in my life when being dishonest with women was the natural way to be. I finally said, “Hey, I have to stop this silliness.”
Jamie Foxx does a good rendition of me. It’s a real gift, mimicry of that kind, the tonal thing. It’s sort of like having a talent for playing an instrument.
I’ve never cared for guns. In fact, when I did ‘Scent of a Woman’ I had to learn how to assemble one.
One of the things that made me want to be an actor more than ever was seeing a Chekhov play, “The Sea Gull,” when was 14 in the Bronx.
It used to worry me what people said about me. I’m learning not to worry as much. Sometimes you feel critics are wrong all the time, but I don ’t take objection to it, because that’s the way it goes. They can be wrong, they can be right. They can be cruel, they can be kind.
People are always asking me to do Shakespeare – at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It’s like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It’s great therapy.
I turned down a lot of films before I made my first one. I knew that it was time for me to get into movies.