I was an English major at UCLA when I was 18, and then I left after a year to start acting. I was educating myself during that time.
I still work really hard, but I like to think I’m a little smarter about at least the type of movie I’m getting into.
As an actor in the classroom, you’re revealing so much, and teachers are, you know, they’re just critiquing like a painting or a piece of work; it’s like, it’s you, and it’s your emotions that they’re working with.
I got arrested for graffiti. I got arrested – a lot of, like, underage drinking, drunk in public, shoplifting, you know, your various, like, suburban arrests, I guess.
I have high aspirations. I want to be an architect.
I learned a lot of good things in my school. I’ve audited a lot of other schools, and I guess after a while I got a little tired of the acting school atmosphere.
For some reason, when I was in junior high school, my friends and I had, like, a cologne-stealing ring.
You just don’t really rehearse kissing scenes, whether it’s male or female.
There’s a long tradition of teen comedies where the kids are getting drunk on beer and whatever else, so smoking a joint to me is no worse than having a beer. So, if someone has a problem with it, I’ll just tell them to relax.
We all age. You shouldn’t discount it as a subject for a film. Just because the characters are dealing with issues that you might not deal with for another 45 years doesn’t mean you won’t like it.
There’s this phenomenon where people do like to announce movies that they think I’m doing that I’m not.
I’ve come to a point where I just want to do movies that I just believe in. I have come to an understanding of filmmaking, a new understanding where I believe it’s a director’s medium. That means working with people that I believe in.
I loved the world of Oz. I guess as a young man, I was just drawn to fantasy worlds. I liked being transported to alternative realms where a lot of my early imagination was sparked.
Fight scenes are really more like dances than they are fights, because you’re depending on your partner to do the right move at the right time. Yes, a tough person or somebody who knows what they’re doing will look better in a fight scene, but it also has a lot to do with the other person.
If you have a profession that depends on what you look like, you can’t blame somebody for caring about that. It’s part of their job. So it’s vanity but it’s also not in a lot of cases. It’s being professional.
I think it helps the writers to sell their books if they announce my attachment. But it doesn’t mean that I’m going to make the movies in the next year or two or three.
A director on a film really sets the tone of how people go about things, so everybody is happy to be at work and everybody does their best.
I guess in some people’s lives, no one tells you what to be, and so you be nothing.
They’re just peanut butter and jealous! Haters gonna hate, and ain’t-ers gonna ain’t.
Funny how new facts pop up and make you doubt that there’s any goodness in life. Everyone pretends to be normal and be your friend, but underneath, everyone is living some other life you don’t know about, and if only we had a camera on us at all times, we could go and watch each other’s tapes and find out what each of us was really like. But then you’d have to watch girls go poo and boys trying to go down on themselves.
In Paranoid Park there is this Punk girl that keeps looking straight into The camera when she speaks, It’s like she’s speaking to us.