'Catch-22' was a huge failure, and it rubbed off on everybody connected to it. I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about.
It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.
I know it wouldn't seem like I've had a lot of failure in my career, but there are things that I regard as failures, when I look at certain performances and go, 'That's not good enough.'
When I got Jacob's Latter, I was nervous because I felt I wasn't allowed to fail. I felt that they were waiting for one little failure and that would prove them right and I'd be, 'out of there.'
The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There's no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It's a high-wire act. That excites me.
In Torch Song, I did that character almost non-stop from 1978 until I made the movie in 1987. Then I had some failure, which also colors how you react to doing other things.
There's something to be said for failing. It's not the failure you feel, it's the failure that people project when something disappoints. You're back to ground zero, where there's no expectations, and that's where I like to be.
One must never assume that a character is sympathetic because of either the actor playing them or the fact that they're a lead. I think that's a recipe for failure, actually, because if they become unsympathetic, you lose your audience.
Bacon is so good by itself that to put it in any other food is an admission of failure. You're basically saying, 'I can't make this other food taste good, so I'll throw in bacon.'
I even get inspired by movies that aren't very good, because there's always something good in movies that are collectively thought of as a failure. There's good in everything, I find.
Something I'm going to try to really instill in my own family is a lot of tradition. And, I used to have a lot of superstitions, and then I realized that it was kind of hogwash. Once I let go of them, I relaxed a lot.
My grandfather was from outside of Moscow, and my grandmother, although some of her family were French, was from Odessa. They met as immigrants in New York in the early '20s. My mother's family came over from Ireland generations ago.
In 1979, when I was toddler, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and my whole family fled to Vienna, Virginia. Far from home, my parents were determined to raise my two sisters and me according to Afghan traditions.
I think the obvious answer is I was raised in New York City, so growing up, not only myself but my family, like my father, we would watch a lot of Scorsese films.
No one in my family had a retail or marketing background. They were professionals. They didn't understand just what I was doing by going into retailing. After I started, though, it got into my blood. I knew this was what I wanted.
My family was very supportive of my acting. They didn't really have a choice because I got jobs acting before anyone could really say anything. It paid my way through college and helped my family out.
These displays of affection mean a lot to our family and are a reminder of the heart that my people have. In this time of grief we ask for a little privacy and space to digest this news; our sister was our sun and we are broken by her departure.
The results of this survey are shocking and should be a wake-up call to men and women that drinking and smoking too much not only gives you a bad headache in the morning but can affect your ability to start a family.
I was a very special child. I did stand-up comedy. I did it all. My family didn't understand. 'Aren't you tired?' I'm like, 'No.' I'm like an insomniac, I hardly sleep, I'm always on the move.
I'm from Chicago, my family started a chain of movie theaters in Chicago that were around for 70 years and then one of them became the head of Paramount and the other was the head of production at MGM and we all came out of Chicago.
Sometimes I think I missed out on things like travelling. I'd have been terrified of missing an audition. I didn't start a family because that's not something I take lightly. Acting meant so much to me.
