My first cut was three hours and 17 minutes. And then I just became very shrewd about the editing.
Trying to find the story within the story was hard. Filmmaking is such a reductive process in a strange way and you keep whittling away to what is essential.
Some of my favorite scenes aren’t in the movie. Because you, at some point, realize that your responsibility as director is purely to the story. It’s not to your pleasure.
That was an interesting aspect: to go to war with the Church to fight for the very thing that the Church was meant to give to people.
I grew up on Lake Michigan during the PCB explosion, and I remember seeing the sick, dead fish with tumors, the weird deformed seagulls, the scum and the filth floating. We couldn’t go swimming.
I think people ought to realize that if you’re doing investigative reporting, you’re putting something on your newspaper or on your website that no one can get anywhere else, and theoretically at least, that should make people subscribe.
Even if my movies weren’t big blockbusters, directors generally liked me, so they would fight for me.
I got into acting because I wanted to act and I love acting. That’s my true north: to be creative and to be challenged in what I love to do.
Artists have always been the front line; that’s part of our responsibility. But a lot of the big actors come out, they get slammed, and then they retreat.
There’s a level of trust that you have to have with somebody.
The idea of selling is a projection that people create about people that is more of a reflection of who they are than what is actually happening in front of them with the artist.
I know what it’s like to have these big multinational corporations invade your land and promise jobs and promise it’s gonna be safe, and then you see the consequences.
I have a carpool with a corrections officer and a construction worker. My kids get to see that we’re not segregated based on wealth or standing. It’s very cool.
It’s a point of pride that no one would treat me any differently because I’m an actor than if I was a gardener.
When you’re trying to do character work that’s different from what people expect from you, you’re sort of in territory that is uncharted, and you don’t know how it’s playing all the time.
I’m very nervous in the beginning and then I get in there and start doing my work and I feel more comfortable.
As an actor, you want to remain vulnerable. You don’t want to always have all the answers and you want to be fine doing things in the moment with your fellow actors.
Each role, I feel like takes you on a different journey based on who that character is.
As an actor, I started using dreams more, which is not mystical or anything like that. I just found that I’ve been using that as a tool to give me another point of view towards the work. It’s often surprising but really helpful.
There’s a misperception about actors that we actually choose the roles we end up doing – it’s more that we’re chosen for them.
When you’re on the road, you sort of go crazy and being away from your family you get stir-crazy and lonely, so I try to keep myself involved as much as possible.