I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.
I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.
You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do.
There's the argument that you can relate to someone who's completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.
I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?
Agnes Varda changed my view of cinema; she directs from an artistic point of view, and a film is most of all the expression of an artistic director. I learnt to enter the world and the imagination of a director.
Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.
A lot of people have said that I'm super-snarky and mean. But honesty is the only way to get people to change. It's very important to be constructively critical - give people alternatives and you're giving them a new way to see themselves.
What is magical and mystifying to me about style is not that by seeing we can believe. It is that eventually, we can believe, because we can see... we can embrace change the more we can make it tangible.
I am not only overwhelmed with excitement to be back in the seat but also to show my support to help raise awareness to end domestic violence and sexual assault by displaying the 'No More' symbol as I pilot the No. 24 car.
When I was 15, I worked as a bag boy in a grocery store. I also needed to walk old ladies to their car and put their bags in the car, and they would give me two dollars. I felt like the richest man in the world.
It was not until I started racing for car manufacturers that I found a car I could really get attached to. I am the son of a car dealer, so up until then, cars just came and went.
Once when I was 16 I had my car taken away from me for being past curfew. Oh, and I said a bad word once, and I actually did get my mouth washed out with soap.
After I joined Toyota, there was a period when I drove more than 200 cars in one year - different types, other companies' cars. I want to be able to tell what distinguishes one car from the next.
Everything officers go through in any chase anywhere in the country, but amped up 100 times! I'm right in the thick of things in a car going like 80 miles an hour, and doing 360s in the middle of the road. It was a wild ride.
I bought a 1964 Bentley for $1,600 and re-built it over five years. When I drove it in Tokyo after that, it was the pride of the road. That car would command at least $150,000 today because 'Bikram' has restored it.
A car to pick me up every day, a chair with my name on it, everybody being very polite... what can you do except sit back and watch it all, try to take it all in?
Anything that's different from your own realm of experience as a human being, whether it's driving a car or a boat, or using guns, anything that separates you from yourself and leads you more towards this character's existence is a big help.
I'm constantly saying that I have bad hair days when I'm in New York. It's so hard. I've been lucky enough to jump immediately into a car, head straight to the location, and stay in the air-conditioning.
Growing up in Southern California, it's all car culture. When I was a kid, I knew every single model of every single car dealer; I knew every style of every year.
When you're doing Sebring in the back straight at 185 or 187, and the car's moving, you gotta know what to do with it, how to read it. Just the science of understanding shocks - forget spring rates - is mind-boggling.
