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.
I remember calling directors numerous times and saying, 'Oh, you should cast so-and-so instead of me. They're much better for the role.'
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.
It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.
When I started out modeling, there weren't casting directors and there weren't stylists, so you just dealt directly with the designer. We were all much closer back then.
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.
I have the highest respect for stars and auteur directors. But I don't want to work with people who only invite me to the preview. We want to be in the collaborative movie business, not the financing one.
I am a sensitive writer, actor and director. Talking business disgusts me. If you want to talk business, call my disgusting personal manager.
A well known director wouldn't take the chance on casting me for an American role after he discovered that I was English. Some time later, he expressed his regret that he hadn't taken the chance with me.
'Ashes of Time' was my third film, and as a young director at that point, it's not very often that you have the chance to make a big martial arts film, so of course I jumped at this opportunity.
But it's cool working with female directors because I'm a girl, so you do relate to them more. You can talk to them about other stuff like clothes and all that.
