In choosing any role, I ask the same questions: what kind of part is it? is the role challenging? does the director have a vision? is the story moving? etc.
It's really hard as a screenwriter, you feel like you have a vision and then you turn it over to a director and you have to let it go.
I feel like this is the way I was meant to interact with acting. Which is as a director, and helping, working with actors to find their way. Facilitating their performances is so satisfying for me.
If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.
If you knew my wife, you'd be like, 'Yeah, you're very married.' She runs the household. I refer to her as 'the greatest director I've ever worked with.'
But I don't think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director. Whether I'm French or Australian or whatever, it's really not important.
If we really exist merely to fulfill God’s plan: then life is a television drama; with God being the scriptwriter, the director, and, the audience.
My career is based primarily upon finding a balance with a director and their vision, and that means sublimating my own personal ego toward their material.
I actually started as a director, but then I saw Mark Ruffalo in 'You Can Count on Me,' and I thought to myself, 'I want to do that.'
If you know where you stand, and your minus and plus points as a director or as a human being, you will never go wrong. You will always be successful.
A lot of times, actors and directors don't want to repeat something. I don't think we're repeating something, but I think there's certainly a genre that we're in, and we're happy to embrace it.
I'd say that the director I had most involvement with was Alex Rockwell in 'In the Soup'. It was one of my earliest leading roles, and he gave me a lot of responsibility as an actor.
Bad directors will tell you they absolutely know how to do it, and how it has to happen; there's this insecurity that leads them to feeling like they have to control everything.
Sometimes, with directors, you have to take what they say and translate it in your head, into something that makes sense to you, because you're speaking two different languages.
I went to Cal Arts and AFI, and I worked on 'Bonfire Of The Vanities.' I got this grant from the Academy to be Brian De Palma's apprentice director. And it was such a harrowing, disillusioning, awful experience.
With acting I am being led by the script, other actors, the director, etc. But with songwriting I feel it is much more self reliant and allows me to be in the creative experience without being as dependent on others.
Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.
Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.
I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.
My dad's a lighting director. Growing up in Hollywood, I was around the entertainment industry all the time. I knew I'd end up in show business in some capacity, eventually.
It was always my dream to be a director. A lot of it had to do with controlling my own destiny, because as a young actor you feel at everyone's disposal. But I wanted to become a leader in the business.
