I am a fan of the Coen brothers. I'm not a fanatic. I'm a big admirer. They create unique worlds, and there is a real atmosphere to their films. Not everyone can get that. That's a massive part of their appeal: you can recognise them. Like all the gr...
'Con Air' was kind of a turning point for me, in my mind. I never shot anybody in that movie - I never did anything bad - because there were so many bad guys in that movie. I said, 'The hell with this, I'm just gonna be a lovable guy.' I'm like Steve...
Something like Deckard Cain is great; it doesn't ruin your voice. But games that involve violence or battle or mutating and stuff like that really does take a toll on your voice. And I've even had to start to go to a voice guru kind of guy to do exer...
I don't call cut between the takes - it's my way to help the actor keep focused. As soon as you say 'cut' you have 10 people jumping on them and everybody's trying to do a great job, and they do, but sometimes they forget that the more important thin...
I've had problems with my eyes, and my legs hurt if I walk a great deal. That's due to very bad circulation. It's called claudication, and it's painful. So I have to stop if I'm walking, and pretending I'm looking in the window, so that I can rest th...
My view is that musicals are love stories with great final scenes. It's just that simple. Musicals are also conflicts between two worlds. And by those criteria, 'The Color Purple' is actually exactly the kind of story that makes for a great musical. ...
I discovered the fun of genre is... you get to explore your fears, and you get to use the metaphor of the genre - whether it's a giant monster or a... 12-year-old vampire. Whatever it is, you can sink something underneath the surface and make a perso...
I love ghost stories, and I also have a great fondness and love for 'Quatermass,' which in many ways is the show that preceded 'Doctor Who.' 'Doctor Who' borrowed quite a bit from 'Quatermass' and probably wouldn't have existed in anything like the f...
There's just a feeling, when you're just an actor - I have great admiration for people who are just actors. I don't understand it, the idea of waiting to get cast, being at the whim of others. I find it incredibly powerless and frightening, so that's...
Cinema is a director's medium, so you're saying, 'What do you want?' Being an actor is about adapting - physically and emotionally. If that means you have to look great for it and they can make you look great, then thank you. And if you have to have ...
When you break a sweat you just feel great. You've got your endorphins going. You feel better. You look better. And if you aren't able to get a workout in, try to find a steam room somewhere. You just look and feel so much better after a sweat.
What I like about the third movie is you get to see a side of Carlisle you haven't seen before. You actually get to see what his vampire capabilities are because there's some great battle sequences. It's my favorite book. Carlisle is holding on to th...
Now that my wine has been served in the White House, why not me? Who could talk to farmers better than I? Somebody even asked me the other day if I had anything in my platform about taxes. 'Hell yes,' I said. 'Great state. But I wouldn't want to live...
I lived at the Gramercy Park Hotel for about 10 years. It was terrific. It was a pleasantly run-down hotel of the '70s and '80s with a mix of older, rent-controlled apartment dwellers, Europeans and new wave and punk bands. The room service was great...
My mother always tells me that when I was a little kid, my first ambition was to be a truck driver, and after that, I went through everything from wanting to be a Prime Minister to an air hostess, but never an actor. So I became one, and it was a gre...
Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've disc...
For no. 1, it's great writing, super writing. The second thing is that it's great chemistry with all the actors. We just all got along from the very start. Very get-go, we all got along. We just - it was just like we were all meant to be there togeth...
I was doing a play out in L.A. 20-some-odd years ago called 'Goose and Tomtom' by David Rabe, and somebody saw it and the next thing I know I'm doing the table read of the film version of 'Glengarry Glen Ross' with Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon - one of ...
I had been very impressed with the voiceover of 'Apocalypse Now,' with Martin Sheen's voice. That was a great voiceover; it really internalized the Martin Sheen character, who was essentially fairly low key and didn't say a lot during the whole movie...
I was always a big fan of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner's '2000-Year-Old Man' sketch. I think it's one of the biggest influences on the podcast, definitely. You'd never say Carl Reiner was the funniest dude on there, because he's just teeing it up, but ...
I basically taught myself how to sing and play by copying records, and that's just how it was for me. I know that's true for a lot of budding musicians out there - that's the thing that gets them inspired, is trying to learn their favorite songs. I t...
