I look at actors like Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, and Benicio Del Toro, and they play all these different characters. I'm hoping that, in my lifetime, I'll be able to look back and say, 'You know what? I did all these different characters, and I enjoyed ...
When Shakespeare wrote, he wrote for the people. I know he got commissioned by kings and queens, but he also actually was writing plays for people to go and see, to take them on a journey of recognition so that they could see themselves within the ch...
Lots of people say that everything that we possess, experience and want; like books, music, films and holidays are all just a big distraction from death. But I think differently. I think it’s the exact order and presence of these trivial things tha...
As far as my projects are concerned, I have always maintained a healthy balance. My south Indian projects have never taken a backseat even though I've been busy in Hindi. Both regions have loved me, and being wanted by both the north and south film i...
I think I enjoy working obviously as a lead, but also you know I feel I'm also a character actor as well, so I enjoy approaching various projects in all sort of capacities. Any film I have been able to do I feel very fortunate to have been a part of.
In terms of tackling different subjects, I can't really think of anything I wouldn't want to try; that's the fun of it right? Each new style brings new challenges - not that you shouldn't focus on one and master it, but it takes so long to make a fil...
I would direct TV. That's a little different. It's more of a contained world as a director. When you're doing a film you get on the rollercoaster, you put the safety bar down and then you're gone. And it's hard. It's hard, too, as a parent, I think, ...
The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. ...
When you're writing, it's all up to you, and you don't have to make any compromises. And when you're directing, there's this intense pleasure you get from working with all these really talented people, and pooling the efforts towards a common goal. I...
I'm always polite in auditions, but I wasn't like, 'Oh, please give me the job,' for 'Robin Hood' because I didn't think I'd get it. I got told about the audition just a few days before I went to India to film something else. I must have been a bit c...
People think that what I see diving must drive what I put into films, but that isn't really the case. When I am making a Hollywood production, I am telling a different kind of story. Of course, if I see something interesting that works, we will look ...
I grew up in a town with no movie theater. TV was my only link to the outside world. Film wasn't such a big deal to me. It was TV. So much so, that when I meet TV stars now... Not my co-workers, but real TV stars, I get nervous. I freak out around th...
As a director, you're a bit of a dictator. But I feel that you're a better director if you're open to other people's ideas. It means that it's tougher: you have to be in a choosing process; you have to put the ego aside. As long as everybody's aiming...
I met Jack Nicholson when I was about 10 at a party of my uncle's, and it wasn't so much that I knew his films because I was small, but he wore sunglasses inside at night and I thought that must mean he was very important and was suitably star struck...
I am not doing comedy because the genre is successful. If that was the case, I would have done a run-of-the-mill comedy film. I set my own trends. I like to give something new and different to my audiences. I want to do the kind of comedy that has be...
The way that I look at it is that, when we film for eight months straight for a new 'Jackass' movie, I know that I'm going to wind up with at least two broken bones. I don't know when it's going to happen, but you can't contemplate how you're going t...
A movie I must have seen 10 times is 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.' It's an old movie, but still such a beautiful message. If I had only one film I could take on my computer on a desert island, I would take 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.'
I play Father Francis in 'The Exorcist Prequel.' It's fantastic. We are shooting in Morrocco and Rome. Paul Schrader is directing; Stellan Skarsgard plays the younger Max Von Sydow character. It's just a fantastic script. It's a very eerie, very scar...
You become very angry and depressed that you keep getting offered only these exceedingly demure and repressed roles. They're so not me. That's why films like Fight Club were so important to me because I think I confounded certain stereotypes and limi...
I guess because I'm so young, I m not sure of what lies ahead for me. I'm more into going the route of producing and directing. I just made a little short film. I'm more excited about going the route of doing a Drew Barrymore or... what's the one fro...
I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the l...
