So it took me five years because in the interim I have been doing a lot of personal appearances and movies and some television series that went into the plumbing and I stopped writing for a while.
I didn't want to chase movies. It's too hard. You've got to work at it - opening nights, photo shoots, publicity people, managers. I never wanted to do that. I'm too lazy.
My favorite movies growing up were things like 'The Wizard of Oz,' but as I got older, I really began to admire people like Steven Soderbergh.
A lot of times I'll make films that are mostly character-driven films - stories that involve people. Like, I make the joke: I like to make movies about human beings that live on Earth.
I did as much as I could in Vancouver. You can only play so many ex-'Falcon Crest' sons in so many movies of the week before you burn out.
The time it would take me to write a screenplay it would take me the time to make two films. I would rather make the movies, and I'm a better moviemaker than I would be writer.
'Transformers' was important and defining for me because it taught me about what kinds of movies I want to make and the kind of actor I want to be, and I have a long way to go before I become that actor.
For six months I'd do movies and make it all about me. Then the other six months, it's not about me and it doesn't matter what my hair looks like or what anything looks like.
I remember my first taste of American big movies was 'Ghost Rider.' I'm in two little scenes. But for those two little scenes they had 400 extras, upside-down stunt cars, and a fire brigade.
The reason I started writing movies was because I kept getting parts that I just kind of stepped into. I didn't have to do a lot of work and I ended up getting sort of bored.
The things I see now on TV and in movies are so outlandish. Kids doing rude things with pies! And the language that they use! It's being outrageous for the sake of being outrageous. I can't watch it. It turns me off.
You know, sound was still a fairly new thing when I came into movies. And the reason musicals happened is because of sound. They could put music in the picture! That's how it all began.
By the '50s and '60s, war movies had become big and impersonal. They almost never bothered to characterize the Japanese enemy as particularly evil; in fact, they never bothered to characterize him at all.
I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O'Neal, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown, Pam Grier. For the first time, I saw 'The Negro' get one over on 'The Man.'
I never set out to build some behemoth comedy career. My taste in movies is far more eclectic than that so my aspirations as a filmmaker are far more eclectic than that.
I've seen little pieces of 'Interview with a Vampire' when it was on TV, but I kind of always go yuck! I don't watch R-rated movies, so that really cuts down on a lot of the horror.
I'm not one of those actors where filmmakers that I admire ask me to be in their movies. I meet them at parties and they're nice to me, but they never ask me to work with them.
Duets is about six people, so it's like three different movies - three different duets. I was on the set 18 days, spread out over three and a half or four weeks.
I don't like to see a scary image because it sticks in my mind. Which is maybe why I get hired to do the scary movies because I'm truly scared and upset.
I wasn't a fan of horror movies before 'Saw,' but through these films, I have definitely become a big fan and really come to respect and appreciate the genre and the fans that support it.
Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.
