I'm almost tempted, when I'm playing a real person, not to meet them. Afterwards, maybe. But, the job is the same. You still have to show up on screen and be alive and real and all that stuff.
Being an actor: that's a pretty big net. That's a big playing field. The Screen Actors' Guild is filled with many, many, many, many people and vastly different careers.
There's something about the impact of a big screen that means something to me, even though I realize almost every film is fated to be seen for a year in theaters, and then forever after on television.
As a dancer, it's hard because there's such a perfectionist quality that you really have to let go of while you're acting, because nobody wants to a watch a perfect person on screen.
You never really know until you put the movie in front of an audience. I am a big advocate of screenings, which are getting harder and harder to do nowadays.
It's really odd to be up close to an icon like Bruce Willis. You're used to seeing him on a screen, 50 feet tall. To think, 'Hmm, I'm taller than you are' is just weird.
As soon as people see my face on a movie screen, they knew two things: first, I'm not going to get the girl, and second, I'll get a cheap funeral before the picture is over.
There's something that people misunderstand about screen quotas. It's not about rejecting or hating other countries' films, but about protecting our domestic film industry.
A first kiss is hard to fake on screen. It's tempting to practice before you shoot, but why blow that natural awkwardness on a rehearsal? There's something so beautiful about it that can't be faked.
[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.
We made the joke when we screened 'Bucket List' that there was 100% desire to see amongst our demographic with a 40% ability to get them to see it.
Even the multiplex audience wants this flavour. No big-budget film can be a commercial hit until it does well both at multiplexes and single screens. 'Ghajini' and 'Dabangg' are examples.
Some people talk about screen kisses being strange or uncomfortable. But I think that I got along with Anna well enough that it just happened; it was a fun day of shooting.
I do believe that there are auteurs, in the sense that there are filmmakers with very strong voices and their voices are communicated on to the screen without a lot of compromise.
I think most people, no matter their status now, have big screen TVs, because they're the standard TVs now. And so why would you go to the cinema?
The one problem with the Internet for journalists who like doing long form is that any story that's going to involve 16 screens on the web page... that's asking a lot of people.
Nothing could be recorded in those days except by aiming a movie camera at the television screen. It was at least another 10 years before they had any kind of recording medium.
It has been my experience that work on the screen clarifies stage portrayals and vice versa. You learn to make your face express more in making movies, and in working for the theater you have a sense of greater freedom.
But thankfully, my first album, 'Wide Screen,' was sort of a critics' darling - everyone raved about it, but no one bought it. They only manufactured 10,000 copies; I wasn't even in the running for failure!
The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.
'School Daze' was one of the highlights of my life because it was the first chance I had to act on screen. I would have been happy if that had been it, because I proved that I could do it.
