Sometimes directors will hire you and say, ‘Oh, we love your work.’ And then they start to tell you how to do it. I say, ‘Hey, man, back off. You hired me to do it. Let me do it.’
I think there are more good young actors now than ever. It’s a medium that everyone wants to be connected with – it is such a hip medium going into the 21st century.
It’s no big thing, but you make big things out of little things sometimes.
You just can’t take a crash course to be a tango dancer in a movie.
High Noon is a pretty corny movie.
I always considered myself as a character actor. I always try to be versatile to show different sides of human experience.
I was fortunate in the last century to be in the two biggest hits film-wise, ‘Godfather I’ and ‘Godfather II,’ and ‘Lonesome Dove.’
We’re all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth ’til death. We travel between the eternities.
The one you fight with the most is always the one who’s most like you.
There was nothing wrong with shouting at God.
Spending two years on my uncle’s ranch in Montana as a young man gave me the wisdom and the thrust to do westerns.
Stripping away artifice – it’s the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life – but there’s nothing bigger than life.
Some Russian ballet master woman said there’s no culture in America, but if you look you can find interesting stuff in this country, don’t you think?
Seeing your name on the list for KP or guard duty when you’re in the Army is like reading a bad review.
If you don’t have heroes in the beginning, you don’t grow.
I try not to look for messages in films.
I hope I left behind a legacy that people will enjoy. But whatever they want to say, I can’t predict.
To me, real comedy comes out of behavior. It’s the choices you make as an actor. It’s never about, “I want to do a comedy script.” I can’t think of it that way. And besides, some of those movies, those comedy movies, I can’t even watch them.
You gotta be careful with message movies. People say “What do you want people to take away from it?” I always say its totally individual.
I like the smell of toast. Coffee is okay, but I don’t drink much coffee. But toast is a nice smell. You smell some toast coming from your kitchen in the morning, you know that you’re involved in a domestic situation and the operation that’s going on is pleasant.
You obviously don’t have to be a murderer to play a murderer or you don’t have to be a dictator to play a dictator. So, you’re an actor. You come up with whatever you come up with to play that part.