Violence is used to portray what happens in a film. It only helps portray the actors and what they do. I think it is more about the story, when you have something to play off of.
My father was a big Bruce Lee fan. He's Chinese-Hawaiian, and my mother is Chinese. He used to take us to all these really fantastical films with martial arts in them.
There's something magical still about it when I get in a darkroom, and you've shot a roll of film and you develop it and you look at your negatives, and there's, like, imagery there. That always stuns me.
What surprised me about the Oscars was how familiar it was - because you're in the room with all these people that have inspired you from your childhood to adulthood in the film industry. It feels like you've known them all of your life.
Cinema has become my life. I don't mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.
I have seen 'Thor', yeah. It's fantastic. Being that close to something, it's often pretty hard to watch yourself, but the film in so many ways is so impressive that I was swept along with it like an audience member, and that's a pretty good sign.
What I'm looking for is a self-promoting film; a movie which immediately gets people's imagination is something I can promote - a project which writes its own publicity.
I like Jailhouse Rock and Love Me Tender. The black-and-white films. With music, I tend more toward the '70s stuff because I was at the shows for those, so they bring back memories.
Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences - and it happens all the time - where for some reason the energy doesn't connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.
Every film is faced with the enemy of time. Only so much story can fit into the 90-150 minutes of time that moviegoers are willing to stay in their seats. Naturally, compression is necessary. So are the exclusion and amalgamation of characters so tha...
I did four independent films during the break between 'Twilight' and 'New Moon.' I haven't even really had time to sit back and process it all. But when you do finally sit back and think about it, it's incredible.
I've hardly had an avant-garde career... If you're going to make a film, you have to try to make sure it comes out of a childlike passion, as if you're doing it for the first time.
The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and ed...
Whenever I think of the high salaries we are paid as film actors, I think it is for the travel, the time away, and any trouble you get into through being well known. It's not for the acting, that's for sure.
It gets very tiring when you are filming and then taken to a room to do school work. I never get any rest time. It is either work or school. Once you are an adult, you get to take a nap in between shots.
When you're working with film, you can only shoot one angle at a time, and then everything has to stop, and you re-light it and shoot everything else from the opposite side, so it's really important that you stick exactly to what's written.
In theater, you're allowed to take your time and sit in a role for a month before you have to share it with anybody. In film and TV, you have to just kind of show up and be ready to do that, which, to me, is very strange and crazy.
In a film you only get two hours to do this big arc and so you have to pick and choose your moments carefully, but with television you get to take your time and just take it episode by episode and discover new things.
Comedy, when it works, is light on its feet and has the illusion of complete spontaneity: as if there is no film, no camera. You are standing there experiencing it all in real time. This illusion, I believe, is why so many people think comedy is easy...
Because you're telling a story, and I'm sure people fifty years ago would tell the same story differently if they were telling it to you today. Because the time is different. The film is the work of today's audience.
I loved to watch cartoons and even made little stop-motion films in the backyard. At the time, I never really thought that it was something you could do for a living; it never actually hit me that people do that sort of thing or I would be capable of...
