It's always weird when you see a movie, and there's no reason for someone to, like, jump on stage and be a singer, and then they just do that... But if it came organically, I would grab that mike and jump on stage for sure.
A movie star is someone people look at and go, 'I want to be like that person'. There's the responsibility of desire. It's not something I'm interested in trying. I would fail miserably at it, so why even bother?
Mike Nichols asked if I would do The Birdcage. Mike and I are dear friends but he had never offered me a feature role in a movie. My television career opened other doors for me.
In the past I'd always felt like 'the girl' in the show or the movie. On 'Friday Night Lights' there were a bunch of girls, and I was the woman. Initially there was a little struggle with my identity around that. But now there's a sense of ease.
When movie people go over into television, it's a little bit of a shock. It's much faster-paced. Everything is really last-minute. You won't know your schedule for the next episode until the last minute.
Now, I just made an animated movie a few years ago, 'The Tale of Desperaux' , and that had twelve hundred shots in it. Twelve hundred CG shots is a pretty big plan.
'Flying Down to Rio' established RKO as a leader in musical film production throughout the 1930s. The film helped to rescue the studio from its financial straits and it gave a real boost to my movie career.
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.
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.
