In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.
A million men can tell a woman she is beautiful, but the only time she will listen is when it's said by the man she loves.
I can tell you, if you shoot in the rain you're going to have a lot of voice ADR to do after the movie and voice looping, stuff like that.
When you work with kids, people tell you to be very delicate, but that's the last thing you should do with kids. They feel patronized if you're like that. They just want you to be normal.
I sometimes think it's like a weird elastic band. The more tragic your work is, the quicker you snap back. There's a catharsis in telling a miserable old tale; you get rid of demons.
My dream is to work with people like Meryl Streep, Michael Fassbender, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett. To me, those are true storytellers - genuine people who have stories to tell and make incredible films.
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.
We're beautiful devices. The devices work well; we're all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works.
The kind of job where you come in and work 9 to 5, and where someone tells you what to do all day is becoming scarcer and scarcer.
A lot of parents tell their children that if they want to be an actor, that's fine, but they should do something else first, so they've got something to fall back on. It doesn't work like that, as far as I'm concerned.
I believe the director is the one that sets the mood and if you have this hysterical director it's a domino effect. I would work for him forever, for nothing. Don't tell my agent that.
I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, 'Do you paint?' or 'What kind of medium do you work in?'
I think we do have our true, original stories that work. I can tell you that 'The King's Speech,' which we did, became a worldwide smash because people loved the personal story.
I am beyond critical of my own work. I always tell actors they have to watch themselves 4-7 times in a given scene before they can be remotely objective.
It's really important to me to keep growing as a writer, to look for new challenges and be harshly critical of my own work in order to learn and tell better stories.
That's where I got my start and where I'll continue to work, but I can't tell you the number of films between Drugstore Cowboy and Curly Sue that I auditioned for and wanted that didn't choose me.
I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.
Other times, you're doing some piece of work and suddenly you get feedback that tells you that you have touched something that is very alive in the cosmos.
When you start to think about politicians, you've got to realize these are strange creatures. Other than the fact that they can't tell directions, and they have very strange breeding habits, how do you actually work with these things?
Anyone with a show on T.V. will tell you it's backbreaking work. And if you have a big personality, which I have, and you're a perfectionist, there's going to be head-butting.
Definitely for myself, I find myself gravitating towards dramatic work. In terms of sitcoms, you know, I always tell my agent I don't want to be seen.
