But I've lost parts because of my looks. I auditioned to star with Richard Dreyfuss in 'The Buddy System.' The producers said no one would believe he would leave me for another woman. They just couldn't see me with him.
I see what other people do and what songwriters don't. They don't get out and take care of themselves. Producers turn themselves into a massive brand. Songwriters tend to be under someone else's umbrella. If you're building your own legacy, it can't be under an umbrella.
I want to challenge myself to see where my limit is and experiment with a lot of different films. A lot of artists from Asia focus too much on their Asian background. I don't want to let go of my background, but to be a success in the U.S., which is my goal, I realize I need to surround myself with American filmmakers and producers.
As an actor, you're in the hands of producers and directors. It's important to find out who you're working with.
That said, we don't approach these improvements as only a surface aesthetic. The producers and we think that these men are helped with their inner needs when they pay attention to their externals.
I'm just happy that 'Idol' producers gave me a shot on the show and to be able to show who I really was, because I feel like I'm every single woman.
My dad always produces, and I would always sit in producers' meetings with him. I like the whole thing of putting a movie together. I think that's very exciting.
I really like scripted dramas. My favorite show of all time would have to be 'Lost': I loved how the writers and producers were able to weave the different storylines together; and the acting in that show was incredible.
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
As a director, I've wanted to have adventure in my life, creative adventure. I think it's partly because I grew up, basically from age six to 26, mostly on television series where the producers find something that works and then do it over and over and over again.
My agent says that I'm a 'repeat business guy.' If you hire me to come do a movie, I'll be on time, know all my material, be ready to go, have a good attitude. I'm here to work, so I get hired over and over again by the same producers. If you just be a team player on set you can work so much more often.
It's just difficult to see that people want to be like the actors and the performers and the politicians who are - who they see all the time, but the people that are probably having the most fun are the writers and the directors and the producers and the scientists, right, the people in the back that are getting to do the creative process.
I live in L.A., where every coffee shop is filled with scriptwriters, producers and directors.
Twenty years ago, there were dozens and dozens of independent television producers. There are a couple now, at the most. Mark Burnett, Endemol. It's gone. Everybody works for the Man now. And it's natural law, how that happened: Nobody prescribed it, but it's how things worked out and how it has been for decades, period.
The first role that I got on Broadway was supposedly for a white man. But I had some producers who fought for me and allowed me to come in.
The truth is, for some absurd reason, no one is willing to admit that the interests of the producers and the theater owners are not the same.
A lot of producers get famous because they decide to be superstars for their own reasons, but I'm inspired by Timbaland and Pharrell and Swizz Beatz 'cause they're doing things that are so different. I like how they're introducing ideas I never would have thought of.
I'm an athlete; I've got an ego when stunt doubles have to come in. Not an ego like that, but when it comes to physical stuff, if I didn't have to have a stunt double, I would always probably do it myself unless the producers were jumping in and stopping me.
I actually became a producer because I saw the producers getting all the babes. They were stealing them from the guitarists.
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
The 'Degrassi' producers were very supportive. They sent me flowers when I got 'The Vampire Diaries,' and then as soon as it premiered and got the great numbers that it did, I got another large bouquet of flowers from them.
I have an amazing team; I have amazing producers; I have amazing writers, but at the end of it, it's me making the decisions on the writing, the tone, the editing.
There's talk of the lack of roles for older women. It's so tough and it's soul-destroying what some female actors do to their faces to try and keep producers happy.
Producers are men who will keep their heads in the noisy presence of writers and directors and not be carried away by art in any of its subversive guises. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of cliche.
I toured around the country and met all these Broadway producers who put me in all these Neil Simon plays like 'Brighton Beach Memoirs' and 'Biloxi Blues.'
We need to be creative, on the cutting edge, challenged, and it's really hard going. It's relentless, and we're relentless, and we have a history of breaking engineers, producers. I mean, people come out of working with U2 and just go, 'I just don't know what's happened; it feels like a lifetime has passed by.' And that's just the way we work.
To my knowledge, there is no blacklist. But there is a mindset, even among liberal producers, that says 'He may be difficult, so let's avoid him.'
I talk periodically with the producers at EA and I try to be as honest as possible because as great as EA does, you just don't want to hear good things. These people are really passionate about making games and making them as realistic as possible.
Usually, new producers and writers want to put their stamp on a show. They don't want to continue what's working. They want to reinvent the wheel. It's an ego thing.
A lot of producers now are people who stay in their office and never go to the set. I don't know how you can be the advocate of the movie if you're not there in it every day.
I like to think of myself as a fairly educated human being, but I'm a very uneducated actor when it comes to movies, directors, producers, actors for that matter.
I am tired of kissing on screen. I have to do it because it is synonymous with me. Also, the producers and directors want to add that element. I don't give it too much importance.
Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.
There's a lot of creativity in the industry, but I don't necessarily think that the most creative DJs or producers are always the biggest ones. I think it would be nice to see more of an open culture to different music. I think that's happening. With Spotify, I think people are discovering a lot of artists they might not discover otherwise.
Producers want to put their music behind revivals but I don't think that's a good trend for the theater at all.
When I was a kid, I wrote to the BBC, and the producers sent me a huge package through the post with 'Doctor Who' scripts. I'd never even seen a script and couldn't believe that they actually wrote this stuff down. It sort of opened a door.