If you think Hollywood is depressing and corrupt, politics is really depressing and corrupt — and fueled even more than Hollywood by money — if that’s possible.
I hate the whole reluctant sex-symbol thing. It’s such bull. You see these dudes greased up, in their underwear, talking about how they don’t want to be a sex symbol.
I like the incongruity of how in Iran, these people we think of as being revolutionaries or fanatics or whatever are just as aware of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader as our people are back home.
My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I’m 31-years-old, and I don’t want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It’s humiliating.
When you hire great actors, you’re lucky, so you just try to create an atmosphere where they can succeed and relax and take risks. You’re happy that you get to watch them at the monitor and that your name is on the director’s chair.
Every single director-actor I talked to, from Warren Beatty to Clint Eastwood to George Clooney, said the biggest mistake they made is not shooting enough footage of themselves.
I’m sure I can make a movie that doesn’t feel like a seventies movie! But the truth is, that’s my favorite era in American filmmaking. To me, those were the great years.
There’s a lot of romance to sort of living by your own rules and sort of not subscribing to what society tells you to do, but society pushes back pretty strongly, so there’s a lot of compromise that goes with that.
