I wanted to be Anthony Hopkins and ended up being neither a film star nor having a career on the stage.
There's something very dreamlike about film, and I will always be very fascinated by that, and I'm always tempted to go in that direction.
The problem with doing a schlocky or big budget studio film is that it wouldn't actually be fun for me. It wouldn't be exciting.
I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.
After I won the Tony Award, the film floodgates opened, so I was like a kid in a candy store.
It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.
Even though some of the films I've made haven't been particularly commercial, I don't find them failures.
Film is a dramatised reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real... an audience should not be conscious of technique.
Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.
In my novel, 'First Blood,' Rambo died. In the films, he lives.
I'm always looking for films, but the horror scripts that I get tend to be very repetitive and often not that interesting.
I didn't really discover yakuza films until about five or six years ago.
It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.
In an animated film you can do whatever you want, but that doesn't mean you should do everything you want.
When I was preparing for the film for tree weeks, with David Cronenberg, I had a lady friend come over.
I look at the Christian Bale movies, the 'Batman' films, and that shows you that superhero movies don't just have to be about men in tights.
It's very hard to put forth a film that's about love and the joy of love and for it not to be patronising and not make people nauseous or make them roll their eyes.
I think one of my very favorite films of all time was with Peter Sellers when he played Chauncey, the gardener. Being There.
The first time I met James Franco, he was dressed like James Dean. He was James Dean, literally, filming a biopic.
Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.
Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them.
