Everything about filmmaking is incredibly weird, and there’s nothing natural about watching yourself on the big screen or hearing your voice. It’s that same thing that you feel when you watch yourself on a video camera and you hate the sound of your voice – it’s that times 800.
Up there on the screen, we can all fly. But down here on earth, we need to be each others wings.
Take life step by step, pace by pace, slowly slowly, and leave the competition to others.
As an actor there’s a lot of scrutiny and, even when you’ve had success, it becomes about sustaining that success. A friend of mine described it as a peakless mountain. Even for De Niro there’s Pacino and for Pacino there’s De Niro.
I walk around talking to myself in accents. Usually people look at me like I’m a complete fruit loop.
It can be a miserable profession, acting, because you always want what you can’t have.
Listen, acting is not surgery, it’s entertainment. You’re doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we’re vulnerable is that we’re always trying to recreate human behaviour.
I’m just one gigantic ball of rancid fear and self-consciousness. I’m entirely fueled by fear, so the fact that I knew it could be a catastrophic disaster made me unable to sleep, and made me work quite hard.
I’m trying to buy a house and set some sense of roots because otherwise you’re constantly chasing one job after another, and you look back and you’ve had all these very extraordinary experiences with extraordinary people, but there’s not a line of continuity to it.
Learning lines is hard for me because I have the attention span of a six year old. That’s why being on planes all the time is so useful – I’m forced to learn out of boredom.
I always try to describe making movies like summer camp, or some holiday where you spend all day, every day with a new group of people whom you kind of love and then never see again.
I’m as voyeuristic and intrigued as the next person as to how celebrities live.
They’re such hierarchical things, film sets, they’re sort of mini societies. Often they’re incredibly political places.
I’m fully aware that I am a lucky, lucky man. This Oscar belongs to all of those people around the world battling ALS. It belongs to one exceptional family, and I will be it’s custodian and I promise you that I will polish him, and wait on him hand and foot.