After watching films of Jim Brown, I noticed that he never ran out of bounds. He always ran North and South and that's what I turned my style into. I was a North and South runner.
The high-grossing films are not all that interesting to me, I have to say. It's not stuff I would want to be in. Yes, you would want the big paycheck, but that's never really been my concern.
The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.
I'm not meant to run around trees. I can't throw my arms in the air and sing, I find that boring and irritating. Sweet romcoms are not my cup of tea. The film has to be a little twisted and quirky.
Horror films have always been quite operatic for me. I always sort of scratch my head at people's offense to them? If you don't get them, and you don't like them, then don't watch them.
We never really know what's around the corner when we're filming - what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.
When I was growing up you would see big American films that really mythologised their landscape, that really showed the vastness and the drama of their country.
However, we couldn't focus on the films much during the series because we're dumb. Individually we're smart guys, but together we're one big dumb guy, and couldn't concentrate on two things at once.
I've worked with Len Wiseman before, on the 'Underworld' series, in which I was a vampire. The first two of those were his first two films. And I admire him beyond measure. I think he's tremendous, as a man and as a director.
A musical film is my idea of heaven. You can pre-record, you don't have to sing live. Singing live was the bit I hated the most. I never felt like a confident singer.
When I first got out to Hollywood, they were pushing me for sitcoms, and I didn't really have an interest in them. I wanted to do films and slowly worked that way. And then it became, I guess, this curse of the leading man.
When you're working on a film, it's not theater; you don't have a few weeks of rehearsal. A lot of times you are showing up on set, and you've never been to the place; you've never met the other actors you're working with.
Like Godfather, you look at a movie like that, or something that James Gray has directed, a film with minimal or pin lighting as opposed to everything being lit bright and flat, where everything is evident.
I'm looking to do an action film where I can run with my shirt off and a gun in my hand; and do like a 'Taken' role and get up on one knee and kill the bad guy.
I haven't done a lot of things in my career that my kids can watch, because they are 8, 6 and 3, and they are pretty young; so given the concepts that the film was about a superhero, it was a black superhero, and it was a father and son type partners...
Not bragging by any means, but I could have done a lot of other stuff as far as working in films go and working in television... I had chances to do that stuff, but I like baseball, I really do.
Film is much more visual, a scene is typically a lot shorter, you're dealing with a lot more characters, a lot more locations, and you're able to rely on things that you just can never do on the stage.
You really have to be careful with the clues you lay into the film - if they're too heavy-handed, or you've pandered to a slightly stupider audience, then you've spoiled it for the people who are even slightly smart.
As for futuristic costumes, I loved doing 'Gattaca' because I'm a minimalist at heart, and it's a very minimal film. Plus, with Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke and Jude Law, how could you go wrong?
For me everything in the film was gradually building, becoming more emotional, so it helped. At the end of it all I was emotionally drained. At that point I took Rose's view, that this has to happen, there's nothing I can do about it.
I remember the first film I did, the lead actor would, in between scenes, be reading a newspaper or sleeping and I'd think, 'How can you do that?' But it's so exhausting, you can't be 'on' 12-14 hours a day.
