When a mother or father is willing to pay smugglers and risk the lives of their own children by sending them on a dangerous journey to the U.S. with no guarantees, you know the situation must be dire. As the most powerful nation on earth, we must do ...
We all like going to the dark side of things; we all like dipping into worlds that we don't know anything about, or hopefully don't know anything about. I think 'Banshee' gives people a chance to do that pretty safely because we all know there's a so...
What's been nice is that I've been able to direct from a very idealistic place. I've never had to make my living as a director, which gave me a chance to choose material I feel passionate about. The directing allows me to not have to grab any acting ...
If you want to make pictures and enjoy making them, you better go out and make something that a lot of people want to see. And then they'll turn you lose and let you make what you want. And then maybe you can do some of the things that you want to do...
If I saw my friend's boyfriend flirting with someone else, I would definitely talk to him about what I saw. I would want to give him a chance to explain. However, depending on how major the flirting was, I would probably mention it to my friend - jus...
I looked for acting classes in Paris just to do something different than modeling. And then one day I just thought, 'Okay, that's enough, I have to start doing something.' I went to the acting agency and I just told them I wanted to act and asked the...
Dad often told me, 'My job is to help my boss do his job and make him look good.' That was my dad's objective. Everything about the way he conducted himself was to communicate support for his superiors and respect for his coworkers. The way he dresse...
My last album as J. Tillman, 'Singing Ax,' that was really a premeditated death rattle of the aesthetic precedent I had set. I realized I wasn't creating spontaneously; I was enforcing all these parameters. I was too self-loathing or something, and t...
The fact is Jerry Weintraub, the handsome, bearish movie producer, the man with the long career, who worked with Arthur Godfrey and Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra and George Clooney, is a great storyteller - he's this as much as he's anything else. ...
There are a lot of things I might be good at, such as competitive figure skating, window washing from ten stories up, and being an open heart surgeon. I might also make an excellent Kamikaze pilot - except for the fact that I don't want to learn how ...
With 'Believe' bringing really big success for me outside of the U.K. for the first time, it meant I have been touring around the world and that led to a gap from the studio. I really feel like the gap has done me the world of good. Throughout that t...
As I was growing up, I did a lot of talent shows. I won fifteen Sunday nights straight in a series of talent shows in Macon. I showed up the sixteenth night, and they wouldn't let me go on any more. Whatever success I had was through the help of the ...
I don't dismiss the music that I was involved with, I don't think it was a joke, I don't think it was funny or a phase, I don't think it was just something I was doing back then, to me it was who I am. It connects all the way through. I don't distanc...
You have to make a lot of sacrifices, and the main thing you have to sacrifice is your privacy. It's funny because when I was growing up, my daddy was and still is an insurance agent in our home town. He couldn't go anywhere without somebody recogniz...
I really wanted to find a piano for the farm house. There were so many free pianos on Craigslist, I thought, 'Let's get as many free pianos as we can and stick them all in the barn.' I got eight in a short period of time, only six of which were tunab...
Here's the mark that a lot of people miss nowadays. Producers missed. They leave out the heart and soul. And that's what I learned from Sammy Davis, Jr., from Frank Sinatra, is when you went to go see those shows, you got to know them.
When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that's what other people who I admired did. That's what Bob Dylan did, that's what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways.
I've learned that people latch onto labels and stereotypes. There was a period when I was asked in every single interview how I liked being the new Frank Sinatra... I think people will soon realize that I do a lot more than interpret old songs.
'The Count' wasn't a real stretch. I was doing pretty generic Bela Lugosi bad vampire on purpose. It was supposed to be lame. I didn't put fangs on; it was a guy who was just going through the motions. I drew on the widow's peak with eyebrow pencil a...
Reclaiming the word 'fat' was the most empowering step in my progress. I stopped using it for insult or degradation and instead replaced it with truth, because the truth is that I am fat, and that's ok. So now when someone calls me fat, I agree, wher...
That's the most important thing to me - that if I'm gonna spend however long it takes to make a movie, give up 14 hours a day for however many weeks or months, then it's very important for me to know that I'm working with people who I respect and enj...
