My experience on ‘Jarhead’ was life changing.
Uta Hagen would say, there’s the representational actor and the presentational actor.
On a spiritual level, on a place where you want to be a better human being and listen more, I try. I joke, but it has. I mean, I don’t consider myself a card-carrying Buddhist, you know. But I do believe deeply in the ideas, and I think anytime you have interest in anything, it somehow humbles you.
I think my family love each other so much and expect so much from each other, and I think we expect a type of honesty in the work that we all do.
I was brought up, and my sister too, with two people who were always saying, “What you do is really nowhere near as important as the things that are going on in the world, and if your work needs to reflect that, or you want it to, then you need to strive for a certain type of excellence.”
In that way, as an actor in particular, you’re powerless. And so in that way as an actor in particular you can’t make mistakes.
As an actor, no matter what, you’re at the whim of so many other people all the time.
I think that I have done work where I feel like I’ve challenged myself, and then what’s even more confusing is I’ve done work where I think I’ve challenged myself and no one’s responded to it, and no one’s interested in it.
I don’t think I’ve made a mistake. I think I have behaved in ways that I am proud of; I think I’ve behaved in ways I’m not.
I think, when someone say, “When did you feel like an actor?” it’s those moments when I feel like, “I’m an actor, wow.” That’s an extraordinary moment for me. So it’s not like I walk around going, “I’m an actor.”
I walk around thinking job to job, trying to not have regrets.
Sometimes you need an anchor, whatever it might be. You need a space to connect. So often you get into a way of doing things.
There are a lot of different things that are spinning and connecting when your family sees what you do.
As a producer, you have an opportunity to see the whole and bring people together.
When somebody’s really good, they’re not just thinking about their job.
We all develop relationships with each other based on our first relationships, and then how we experience them. But inevitably they are echoes of earlier on. In my belief.
I’m a very political person, and I make political choices in my movies.
Hardest emotion? They’re all pretty damn hard; I don’t know really if there’s one specifically, but I do think, I don’t know what’s happening or what I’m feeling when I’m actually listening.
There’s no shame in somebody who doesn’t necessarily do that job knowing a little bit more in that instance than you might know about your own job, you know, and I think that is where movies are such a collaborative art form.
I’m always nervous about it. You know, somehow, without even knowing it, I try and recreate the idea of what it feels like to go in front of an audience every night when I’m making a film. And that similar type of pressure and excitement before a scene, or preparing for a movie, so...
I think no matter who you are, no matter what you do in your life, no matter where you come from, you have to fight; we all fight in different ways. And its a metaphor, sometimes its literal, and I really believe that freedom is on the other side of discipline. Your mind can only match where your body is. And so its... you’re never mastering it, there’s always a lesson – things catch you in unexpected ways. And I think that’s a beautiful metaphor for life.