Acting is kind of a forced compassion, where you learn that given certain circumstances, you can feel and do things that you never thought yourself capable of. And so it stops you from being super-judgmental.
Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t a chatty guy, but when he spoke, it was always clear and very funny, in the way that he wrote, in a very specific kind of combination of word groupings and expressions that lived somewhere else.
It’s a very exciting time in the history of this country, to even see people responding to a different way of doing business and really wanting to make a change.
This Catholic thing, I think what it does is it makes a place for mystery in a person. And even when the faith goes away, there’s that space where you crave something bigger than yourself. For me, that’s kind of where art came in, after that.
One night I looked down and my rosary beads were glowing. And I realized that I did not want to see the blessed Virgin – I was terrified.
If Wes Anderson has a very strong cast, he can direct the minutia of that story and still manage to have something that lives and breathes.
I think you have to be ready to switch gears and go with the team as a director, as opposed to superimposing your own strict idea of the story. There are very few directors that can micromanage and still come out with something that’s living and breathing on a page. Wes Anderson is one of those .
With the most interesting directors, the cast comes together to make something magical that nobody counted on.
What I like about The Meddler style of movie is that it’s a fairly lighthearted romantic comedy, but there are hidden moments where something happens that’s unexpected, that hopefully have some kind of emotional resonance that you didn’t see coming. I love when a film does that.
I think looking at your own life, on- and offscreen, you can motivate anything, or you can delude yourself into anything.
It never really worked for me to have long arguments about motivation.
Sometimes when you have to go into something, unless you’re gifted and can just turn it on and off like a jukebox, you find someplace where there’s nothing going on to get yourself into whatever state your character is entering into.
Sometimes what happens is that, when you micromanage actors and moments, it just doesn’t quite live.
The directors I consider really great have the ability to recognize when something’s going in an unexpected direction and see it as a bonus and be able to go with it, as opposed to locking down what they thought was going to happen.
It’s a miracle when something actually turns out well because there are so many ways for it to go wrong.
Being a Catholic, I was drawn to the mystery of the Latin and the smoke and the mirrors and all of that. That part of my disposition definitely did lend itself to finding my way to the back door of some artistic pursuit.
When I grew up in the church, we were praying because the Communists were going to come over and hang you upside down on a cross, and I so wanted to be a good person, and I had these rosary beads that I would sleep with every night, and I just wanted the blessed Virgin to be on my side.
I always had a problem with original sin; I always had a problem with the exclusivity of the church and a lot of the things that the nuns taught me.
By the time I went to the Catholic University of America, which was the time the priests were all leaving with the nuns, the more I studied about the Bible and how it came about, the more I lost my faith.
I’ll always rather be in a ship that’s got a captain that has some vision.
It’s really hard to find stuff that is original. You pick up scripts and in four pages you know where it’s going and the same thing when you are sitting in a theatre, I just rejoice when something unfolds in a way that I’m not conducive...