I felt that I shouldn't be an actor who just makes movie after movie in a quest for prestige and money.
In England, we have this saying about Marmite: people either love it or hate it. That's like a lot of the movie work I've done. People either find it repulsive or find it really interesting and get engaged in it.
'True Blood' is shot on film. It's more like a movie, and they take more days to shoot it, plus it has an hour of content. 'The Good Wife' is network. They're shooting on HD. It moves quicker and they only have forty minutes of content instead of a full hour. Not to mention the difference of shooting, you know, rated-R stuff!
When I want to support a film starring actors I like, I purchase several tickets at the box office - even if I can't stay for the movie.
I've written pilots. I wrote a movie.
I thought 'The Bank Job' was a really quality movie.
Oh my goodness, I'm in love with Channing Tatum, although I think I'm too old to play his love interest. They'd probably cast me as his grandmomma's friend or something like that, but anything to be in a movie with Channing.
I don't have a favorite genre. I think 'genre' is a literary term. I don't have a favorite kind or type of movie. I like the ones that are good.
By the time 'Buffy' finished its Bay Area theatrical run - including a two-month stint at the dollar theater - I had seen the movie well over three dozen times. I was in love.
You take some creative license when you make a movie, and things can be a little bit different.
I actually love woodworking. I'm just getting into it. And I love playing guitar, I'm a big movie aficionado, and I like hiking.
I don't remake any movie, whether old or of other language.
'A Bug's Life' is a really funny movie and the characters have such different personalities. The movie is happy and then gets really sad and I'm like, W'hoa, I'm feeling this way and this movie is about bugs!'
'Skeleton Creek' is like nothing you've ever read before because it's a book and a movie at the same time.
I think - in general, I don't think I've been involved in a single movie that turned out the way I anticipated it to turn out. Just because, as an actor, there's only so much that I can bring to a project.
Occasionally I'll be a producer for hire on a larger budget movie, but with Blumhouse Pictures, we mainly focus on micro-budget, under-$5-million-dollar movies. That's what we're in business to do, and that's what we're in business to make.
'Serial Mom' tested really well when we finally got with the right audience. But they would go to some shopping mall in a deep, deep suburban L.A. neighborhood where they knew people would hate, and they just wanted to spend money to prove that people wouldn't like it. The movie was not a success when it came out.
When I was working on 'Men of Honor' with Robert De Niro, there's a pipe that he has in the movie, and it took us about six weeks to find the right pipe for him to use and feel comfortable with. It was a great choice, because it was really about what worked with the camera at that time.
Being a writer - even a best-selling one - is usually not anywhere near as public as being a movie star, at least not when I'm out in 'real life' like this. Not that I don't use what fame I have, every chance I get, to help sell more books.
Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.
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.
As soon as you're finished shooting, you have to go into the edit room and choose all of the shots that you're going to commit to because the visual effects vendor has to get it because they'll spend months on it. So, you're editing out of sequence before you've gotten a film for the movie and the performances.
At the end of the day, the less money you have, the easier it is to make a movie.
I think, honestly, that the word 'indie' is a false gimmick. 'Independent' used to mean a movie that was financed outside corporate Hollywood, but a lot of what gets called independent these days is totally produced within that system. And there's nothing wrong with that.
I'm a sucker for a good movie.
I think if you make a good movie, people walk away arguing.
I think about the audience in the sense that I serve as my own audience. I have to please myself the way, if I saw the movie in a theater, I would be pleased. Do I think about catering to an audience? No.
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
'The Replacements' is where I met Jon Favreau, and we just clicked like, you know, like kids at a camp. And he wrote my next movie, which was 'Made.'
Character actors just pile up the credits because you work on a movie for, like, a few days. It's not like I'm the lead in everything I do - far from it. I'm not spending three or four months on a picture; I'm spending three or four weeks. Sometimes three or four days.
'The Player,' I loved so much because it was such a labor of love on all levels, and it was such an enormous honor to be in a Robert Altman movie.
The Tour de France would make a great movie. Drugs, corruption, political chicanery, guys risking their lives - everything you need for a great sports drama.
There are some movie stars in Hollywood that are so scared, they also tell the reporter that they are recording them, in case there is something wrong with what they wrote about them in the papers.
We were talking about the kissing in the movie just recently. Clearly, it's pretty challenging material, but Ang said two men herding sheep was far more sexual than two men having sex on screen.
Out of the blue, I received this offer and invitation to be a part of this movie, 'The Good Dinosaur.' I turned to my Pixar experts, my kids, and asked them what this could all be about. Of course, they flipped out, and it was pretty obvious from their reaction that I was going to do this.
If it was going to be unique, if you're going to make a robot movie in 2011... it had to be different, and it had to be about more than its machines and more than its action.
