I wanted my dad to be proud of me, and I fell into acting because there wasn't anything else I could do, and in it I found a discipline that I wanted to keep coming back to, that I love and I learn about every day.
You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else's. But it's inevitable, so you'd better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.
I didn't get to go to prom; I was filming a death scene on my prom night. But I got to go to all the homecomings, and even the winter formals I got to go to, but the only thing I missed was the prom, but everything else was great.
Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.
Here's a thing about the death of your mother, or anyone else you love: You can't anticipate how you'll feel afterward. People will tell you; a few may be close to right, none exactly right.
In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
There were years when I was a beer and tequila guy, then I got real fat. And then I found that you could actually go on a diet and drink scotch. Then I got hooked on scotch, and if you get hooked on scotch, then everything else just tastes wrong.
I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?
And, in the case of schools, or anything else, if you have something that is forcing you to do better than you did the day before, it makes you look forward and it makes you think in a way that's going to make the product better, which is the student...
The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.
People don't seem to make the connection between their tax money and the benefits that they get from their tax money, like free education, and the fire department, and police protection, and everything else. It drives me bonkers, because it's pretty ...
Religion has convinced us that there's something else entirely other than concerns about suffering. There's concerns about what God wants, there's concerns about what's going to happen in the afterlife.
I applied a lot of the same principles I used in hockey into my acting. I might have had some naive ambitions of making the NHL, but thank God, playing hockey gave me a good foundation for everything else.
I think Ryan Gosling is a really great actor who's meticulous about his work. And I'd love to have the guts that Johnny Depp has to actually go outside the box on a character. When he plays a character, he plays it in a way that nobody else would.
In the U.S., it's like, you start with a great script, and then on set - not everybody, but definitely in the Apatow group - you go off, and you're improvising on camera. So while you're on camera, you're saying things that no one else has ever heard...
One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.
I am a great believer in having the power to end your life and knowing that, in extremis, you can. But I would not want to involve anybody else in my actions if it could imperil them.
My husband works in the music industry and he's always the first to know about great new bands, so I end up seeming really with it because I'll be listening to an up-and-coming band before everyone else hears about it.
My father is very Jean Valjean. He's what I would call a great example of a religious person. He is a deeply thoughtful man whose religion is in his deeds way more than anything else. It's not talked about that much.
Artists were always referred to as great artists. I thought that's what the profession was. One word: great-artist. There wasn't one moment in my life when I thought I wanted to be anything else.
