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 want to thank my wife who I don’t normally usually associate with Iran. I want to thank you for working on our marriage for 10 Christmases. It’s good. It is work, but it’s the best kind of work, and there’s no one I’d rather work with!
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.
No actor forgets the times he couldn’t get a job. I think everyone doing this operates from that fear. You don’t want that momentum to stop when you get it.
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.
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 kinda see my current position like this: Here’s your five minutes in the toy store, so you gotta do all the good movies you can before ‘Chuck Woolery’ rings the bell.
Yes, I’m going to be the President of the United States. You know why? You think you can get chicks by being in the movies? You can really get chicks by being the President.
People decided that I was the frat guy, even though I’ve never been inside a fraternity, or the guy who beat them up at school, even though that wasn’t me at all.
