Being an actor only came about because Arnaud Desplechin, the guy who did 'Kings and Queen', had this curious idea to think that I could be an actor, but I had never acted before, and I was supposed to direct my own film!
When a scene is being shot, it is very difficult to know what one wants it to say, and even if one does know, there is always a difference between what one has in mind and the result on film.
What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.
When I was coming up with the Hal Hartley films, I was cast as a no one. I had no name visibility. I was working at a downtown post-performance-art, avant garde theater company and doing a couple things on television. But I was a total unknown.
I was deliciously happy filming 'True Blood.' I even kept all the scripts in my office, which I never do with any script. Although I did shred them all in one go when the series finished; it seemed like a ritual, somehow.
I remember in 1968 when we were in Cannes, in the festival, and we were supposed to be there 10 days, and the second day the festival collapsed because the French, you know, film-makers raised the red flag in the festival and ended the festival.
I have been in five Harry Potter films and never read a 'Harry Potter' book. If you are an actor, all you have is the script you are given. If you read the book, you might get disappointed about what's been left out.
I sometimes think the theatre is more demanding because it requires things you don't have in films, like it requires you to make the people in the front row believe you and not look an idiot to them while the people right at the back can hear you.
My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.
I go into a young film director's office these days and he says, 'Hey man, I know who you are. I grew up watching 'McHale's Navy'. And I think, 'Oh boy, here we go again'.
The first feature film I did, when I did 'Night Shift,' I improvised quite a bit because I would improvise at the audition, so sometimes I would return to the original lines, and then when I was on set, I would improvise even more.
I always knew I was going to be successful in some way with films. I don't know why. I had no particular talent, but I always knew I was going to be sitting in a dining room with Lucille Ball and at a cocktail party with Bette Davis.
Because I once became so distraught watching the film 'Watership Down,' my parents were happier to let me watch action adventures featuring humans and warriors rather than cute animals.
There are different types of bullying; one of the biggest ones out there right now is cyberbullying. I had the privilege of filming an 'Austin & Ally' episode centered on cyberbullying, how it can get out of control, the ups and downs that you feel, ...
If I'm really considering doing film from now on then that is the smart thing to do, or you can go either way. You can just do the same character over and over again and make a different comedy like over and over again.
For 'Prometheus,' I came back to a very simple question that haunted me that appears in the first 'Alien,' and no one answered in subsequent Alien films: who was the 'Space Jockey' - the big guy in the seat? If you really go into that, it becomes the...
I don't go to the cinema often anymore - I'd rather just pop in a disk and get the biggest monitor you've got, and if the quality is superb, I can watch a film, and if I don't like it I can pop it out.
Fundamentally, I always find that most of the films that I've put out are essentially the director's cut. Part of the process with a director's cut is the leaving behind of certain aspects of the movie that we don't feel necessary because they aren't...
The reason I am unemployed for six months out of every year is because I have to turn down most of the films I'm offered. If I didn't, I'd only ever play a dark, satanic count on a horse.
We filmed one scene on the beach and there was definitely weird energy around, and we were followed around by a white owl to several different locations, and little things like that, or certain mishaps would happen and you'd have to wonder what that ...
Elaine and I got married in summer 1979, we went on our honeymoon and came back for the premiere of 'Scum.' All of sudden my face was on billboards in Leicester Square and people were crowding outside the cinema, going mad about the film. It was a co...
