Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'
Other kinds of movie stars, it's a different thing, they bring their persona to the part and that's what people like to see, and they are not really transforming in terms of their character.
If you're a movie star, there's a cycle you go through: adoration, adulation, you're used, and then you're discarded. And it happens again and again, always in that sequence.
I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.
Alan Cumming was such a fun guy to watch. I remember he has a song in the first 'Spy Kids' movie, and when Danny Elfman came to set, they were working on the song.
You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.
Look at every action movie in Hollywood. Every leading man from Spider-Man to Batman to James Bond, 'Bourne Identity', every one of them possesses martial arts skills.
In my first movie, That Night, with Juliette Lewis, I had a scene with two other girls where we applied a cream to our chests to make our breasts grow. I was 10.
I've always wanted to do a movie that takes place in the 70's and was about rock and roll and getting high, like Dazed and Confused or Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
'Brokeback Mountain' just blew me away. I'll always remember talking to Heath Ledger just after he finished that movie and he was going on about working with Ang and how incredible he was.
To become a big movie star like Joan Crawford, you need to wear blinders and pay single-minded attention to your career. Nobody paid attention to me, including me.
If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.
@BretEastonEllis 31 Mar After watching the delirious Room 237 I realized that the worst thing happening to movies was the empowerment of the viewer via technology.
When I'm working on a movie, I'm in my trailer playing guitar. And then on the road, I read scripts and think of... it just keeps both fires burning. I kind of need both.
When you first think of making a monster movie you have to realize that a lot of people may be down on you because there is a big prejudice against such films.
I'm a character actor, so I don't take the hit if the movie's bad, the lead does. So, I don't want to be the lead. He takes the hit, I don't.
If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate.
Do I have a small movie in me? Yeah, probably, when I'm 60. But I'm not Hal Ashby, I'm not Roman Polanski. I'm true to myself. Whether you like it or not.
I think when I'm drawing, I'm seeing what's happening on the page almost as if it were unfolding like a movie in my head.
When you start to become a movie star it's easy to believe that you are Superman. That can fool you. That's why I prefer not to pay much attention to fame.
I'm totally open to it being a movie or a television series or whatever, but truthfully, if no one wants to do it right, I'm also happy for 'Ex Machina' to only ever exist as a comic book.
