I like acting for myself as a director. I act and I know that I’ll have a chance to have some say in what gets used and that I’ll be able to give myself enough takes and be on the same page as myself about how the scene should play.
How about the more than 1 billion Muslim people in the U.S, who aren’t fanatical, who don’t punch women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches, and pray five times a day?
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.
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.
Directing is monumentally complicated and it’s a function of all the time you pay to it. I think it would be great to do a movie I’m not in, I could just eat Fritos and just say, ‘yeah, it’s good!’ Some day.
Studios are used to have an investment in you, an actual, literal investment in an actor. You paid them some money, you had a contract with them and you were almost like a commodity.
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.
I recognize that Hollywood is not about seniority. Often it’s not even a meritocracy. It’s about what you did yesterday. You have a couple of misses, and suddenly it’s impossible to find a hit. So the swings are gigantic. But I’ve always understood it as such, and navigated it as such.
Just because a lot of people know something nominal doesn’t make it important. A lot of people know what a pencil sharpener is, but that doesn’t make it the most important invention of the 20th century.
I remember back when I was a kid there was a comic strip called Plastic Man. His body was elastic and he could make his extremities as long as he wanted. As a youngster I didn’t fully appreciate. But I’m now thinking Plastic Man was probably pretty popular with the ladies.
