Unless you have a long-running series, most actors just go job to job if you're lucky to keep working. You just do a movie or a play or a TV thing, and it's over at some point.
I say making movies is like eating a sandwich of shit. Sometimes you get more bread, sometimes less bread, but you always get shit." (Guardian interview 2006)
I try to read everything that's sent me - play scripts, movie scripts - but I've had to make a rule. If the author hasn't grabbed me by Page 25, the piece goes back with a note of apology.
With a movie, it's probably easier to sustain intensity and seriousness over the 90-minute duration. But in an open-world game it becomes exhausting, demotivating and even uninteresting for the player.
Early in your career, you feel like there is a formula, a path you have to take. You have to do this movie because this person directed it and you have to be associated with these people. In some ways, I have thrown that out.
And then I went to visit my sister in the states and all of a sudden it was just like, it's like... it's like the movie Wizard of Oz when all of a sudden it changes from Black and White to glorious Technicolor.
I found school quite tough, but Saturday night was movie night, and I started to empathise with the characters on screen. I started to get more involved with what these people were experiencing. Film inspired me to do better.
The first set I remember was 'Ghostbusters.' It was a scene in which the street erupted. I remember even at seven years old thinking, 'Wow, if you direct a movie, you can break the streets of New York.'
I quit smoking the day I found out I was pregnant, which was nine years ago. But I'll still smoke in a movie. I have other vices, you know, like potato chips and chardonnay - but not together.
Jerry picked up the technique of visualizing the story as a movie scenario; and whenever he gave me a script, I would see it as a screenplay. That was the technique that Jerry used, and I just picked it up.
I'm not sure what to call 'Lego Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary.' Nonfiction? Movie/toy fiction? But it is any Lego/'Star Wars' kid's dream. Call it spectacular.
Use people whom you're excited by and who share your excitement... The ideal collaboration is one in which the actor and director are saying to each other, 'I can't believe how lucky we are to be making a movie together.'
Screenwriting and the movie stuff could all disappear tomorrow, but to sit down with my laptop and still tell stories is my day job. I didn't believe I'd actually get to do it for a living.
We did the 'MacGruber' Super Bowl spot for Pepsi, which generated some outside interest. We have a sketch where a guy blows up after 90 seconds. How are we going to make that into a movie?
Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.
Quite often, I'll be sent a script for a movie. And I find that I like it, so I say I'll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.
Personally, I consider 'Titanic' the most brilliant example of successful counterprogramming; the film actually countered itself by embedding an epic chick flick within a classic disaster movie.
I'll look back and I'd be better to answer that in about three months from now. Or when the movie comes out and I see it. I don't even know what it is yet. I've still been in the middle of it.
It took a while for the first 'Blade' to get made, and Marvel decided they liked the Whistler character so much, when Blade guest starred on the 'Spider-Man' cartoon, they put Whistler on the cartoon, and the movie hadn't come out yet.
When Steven Spielberg comes to you and says, 'Hey do you want to write a movie about robots?' You just say yes.
I think they went with the idea that people know the story pretty much- knowing that he's going to take her when she's going to go with him. Also, the movie is really focused on Achilles and Hector and their battles.
