For me, the motivation really was to work with Al Pacino. To me, that seemed like an incredible opportunity, just a learning opportunity because I thought so highly of him.
A lot of times when I’ve been offered film series and stuff, if they shoot in Los Angeles, I lose interest.
I’m about as healthy as a person can be. I quit smoking seven or eight years ago.
Sometimes I think candor is the only kindness.
Eventually you love people – friends or lovers – because of their flaws.
I’ve always done things the hard way. I was born like a piece of tangled yarn. The job is trying to untangle it, and I’ll probably go on doing it for the rest of my life.
CGI is to me like watching a cartoon. It can be effective, if it’s done well. A lot of times you don’t feel any real risk. You’re watching a bunch of computer-generated graphics.
The secrecy thing has gotten to be more and more prevalent in films, and maybe that’s good. It’s nice to go see a film and not know anything about it. Sometimes I feel like we know too much about films.
There’s something so wonderful about being an actor in New York.
I think it’s very important that films like Bad Hurt don’t get lost in the mix of the sci-fi-kill-everything-on-the-screen-blood-dripping-down-the-walls sort of the world of the cinema that we live in.
I watch many, many, many independent films every year that you see once in a film festival and they’re never heard of ever again. Many of them are very, very good.
When independent films break through and actually make it into any level of mainstream-ness or get seen by people or find a life actually in theaters, it’s extraordinary. And it doesn’t happen that often.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, there was such a variety and diversity of types of films that you could see. So many of them were really more about the human condition and about relationships between people, and they were smaller films that had a much greater impact on me as a human being.
I have to say from an actor’s perspective, to work with a director who has been an actor through most of their career is a pleasure. They generally have a very deep understanding of the process of what you’re doing, of how you are building and exploring the character.
I’m always surprised when people say, “Oh, it got such mixed reviews.” I guess I didn’t read them.
I try to offer as much as I can to the director so he has as much to work with as possible to create the character that, really, he wants to create in a sense.
When I read a film script, I kind of see it in my head and I see the moments that shape what I understand the character to be. There’s very little time for rehearsal.
I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we’re telling, how do we want to tell it?
You want to move into worlds you’ve never been in before. It would be like going to the same restaurant all the time or going to the same place for vacation all the time. Where is the adventure in that?
Unfortunately, I feel as actors we have to fight for the right to really go in as many directions as possible.
If you just work on your upper body, you’re not going to be a full-range dancer or performer. You’ve got to work in all directions as much as you possibly can.