I went backwards and forwards over it until I was 22. And then in the past few years I began to say to myself, OK, look, I’m not messing around. This is something I want to attack, instead of thinking, I’ll just see what happens with it.
You get those occasional moments when you’re absolutely calm, and you’ve just done something that would have scared you shitless earlier that day, and you’ve just done it like it was nothing. I find that very relaxing.
It’s the actors who are prepared to make fools of themselves who are usually the ones who come to mean something to the audience.
Whatever you do, do it completely. Don’t do it half-arsed. Do it more than anybody else would.
All of the muscles were gone, so that was a real tough time of rebuilding all of that. But you have a deadline, you have an obligation. You’ve said that you will commit to this part, and I just can’t live with myself for not really giving it as much as I can.
Art is something to be proud of. Art is no compromise. As an actor, you’re giving it up, you’re at the mercy of so many other people.
I’ve had some painful experiences in my life, but I feel like I’m trivializing them by using them for a scene in a movie. I don’t want to do that. It just makes me feel kind of dirty for having done that.
What I like about it is that I’m not somebody who’s in movies. I’m a guy who’s not very good going around the track with a bunch of guys who are a hell of a lot better.
Directors go their whole career without being able to tell personal stories and to work with a cast as talented as they are.
You say something bad about Newsies and you have an awful lot of people to answer to.
I would have been very happy just cruising around and enjoying the unexpected. I’ve never been ambitious.
My hope is that people will be repulsed by the character’s complete lack of ethics and obsession with consumerism – that’s what I was saying about the difference between the character’s message and the film’s message.
I like the idea of movies having a magic element. How many times have you seen an actor in a movie who you know only as the character? It’s wonderful, isn’t it?
Essentially, I’m untrained, so I just go with my imagination and try to put myself as solidly as I can into the shoes of whatever person I’m going to be playing.
I never, in any city I’ve ever been in, never remember the names of streets. The longest place I ever lived in was for five years and I didn’t know the name of the next street over.
I feel like I’m pretty good but I don’t like to toot my own horn, you know. I want to let the work speak for itself and kind of move on to the next thing.
After the modest success of my first film, I found it very daunting to have to live with that kind of burden of expectations.