And friends of mine that had photography class in high school would develop the film and make prints and I'd take them back to the track and give 'em away or try and sell them. Much to my parents' dismay, I majored in photography in college.
I feel like I came to acting late in a way. I was about 26 or 27, and it was imperative that I make a living right away, and it's hard to make a living on stage, so I started in television and film.
No one knew what Rodney King had done beforehand to be stopped. No one realized that he was a parolee and that he was violating his parole. No one knew any of those things. All they saw was this grainy film and police officers hitting him over the he...
I'm always interested to see what films are made of books. I kind of don't participate as a filmgoer in any kind of debate about what's better, the book or the movie. So I think it's interesting when people want to do it.
When I got to college, I was intending to study film. But I found that my brain was feeling mushy, so I took a few math classes. I started doing really well at them, and solving equations was this, like, drug rush.
I like films that deal with some of those questions that you can never answer: 'Why are we here? What's it about? What happens to us with the choices that we make? What are the ramifications for doing something right, or doing something wrong?' Those...
People think, 'You're an actor, you can afford clothes,' but I just try to take the clothes from the movie, which makes the selecting of film projects that much more difficult, because you try to play characters that might wear something you'd want t...
To act with a tennis ball and imagine it's a tentacle, or if you're in some kind of wilderness film and you go, 'Okay, we can't have a grizzly bear here, but imagine when you step over the rock there there's a grizzly bear.' I don't know. They're tou...
I suppose I'm always trying to break down the wall between my characters and myself. I'm trying to make the film as expressive and personal as I can, even if I can't explain, for example, how important it is for me to be Jewish.
My idol growing up was Charlie Chaplin. I was obsessed with him. I mean, while other kids were watching Jim Carrey and the likes in the '90s, I was watching Charlie Chaplin films, because I was a bit of a geek. I became obsessed with this idea of phy...
I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.
I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely.
The struggle of making a film for any studio is the fact that the producers and the studio have an idea of what the movie should be, but that is especially the case when the director is being replaced three weeks before principal photography. The cha...
Go out and make something that reflects your interests, your taste, and your ideas. No one will pay you to make something until you have a few things you can show that you've directed. I got my start by making short films on my own.
I agreed to film after my rookie year in Golden State. I was more used to cameras and felt that my journey to the NBA was a story worth sharing. Little did we know how much bigger the platform and documentary would become after Linsanity.
Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that...
I was Paul Schrader's assistant for six months before I went to film school, and he's very much about knowing what's going to happen on every page before you even start writing dialogue - the entire plot and character arcs are mapped out.
Then when I went to Iraq and saw the strength and character the men and women in our military service exhibit every day and their belief in what they're doing, I knew I wanted to get that on film and share it with everyone. They are my inspiration.
I was in 'Cliffhanger' years ago, so I'm a massive fan of the big event movies - the good ones - but there's a lot of crap that's made in between the good ones. It's just the superhuman films that I can't get my head around. I guess if you're a fan o...
'True Blood' is shot on film. It's more like a movie, and they take more days to shoot it, plus it has an hour of content. 'The Good Wife' is network. They're shooting on HD. It moves quicker and they only have forty minutes of content instead of a f...
I've been lucky. I've made films that I really like. It's been a combination of what comes to me and what I choose. I've gone after lots of things that I didn't get, pet projects that everybody ends up chasing after. Really, you're lucky if you get a...
