With 'Attachments,' my goal was to write a really good romantic comedy. I wanted the reader to be smiling throughout.
It's said that you can tell a lot about someone by who opposes them. In the case of liberal pundit Bill Maher - a man who called America's actions cowardly in the wake of 9/11 and who mocked WWII veterans who wanted to visit the monument built in their honor - I wear his disapproval of me as a badge of honor.
My whole M.O. in my 20s was being in as many different types of films as you can. Working with as many different types of directors as you can. I think, in part, that's what I wanted to do as an actor.
I watched a couple of films I was in and thought, 'Those are pretty close to what we wanted them to be. I feel actually weirdly OK with it all. I can still see flaws in what I'm doing, but I think I delivered. I think I improved the film with my presence.'
When I was working with Reebok, Paul Fineman sent me to see David Stern to try to explain to him, basically, the tanning of America: That all rappers wanted to be basketball players and basketball players wanted to be rappers.
I always wanted to do films. I'd gone to New York early in 1976 and did a lot of theater, but I really wanted to chase the paths of people like Pacino and Lemmon and those guys. Alan Arkin. Film was where I wanted to go.
I didn't know I wanted to do films until I started to do them. Very few films are made in Mexico and film-making belonged to a very specific group, a clique.
When I started out, I wanted to be Billy Joel. The plan was to be a singer-songwriter of that ilk, and, then, I got waylaid - that's probably an unfair way to say it - from being a rock star by the musical theatre stuff, which I love doing.
I realised that if I did what I wanted to do, it would work.
I started running around my 30th birthday. I wanted to lose weight; I didn't anticipate the serenity. Being in motion, suddenly my body was busy and so my head could work out some issues I had swept under a carpet of wine and cheese. Good therapy, that's a good run.
As a child growing up in Ireland, you would have to go to Dublin if you wanted to go to the luxury brands. And I remember my mother being too uncomfortable to go into some of those stores. I want to get rid of the barrier.
My parents encouraged us to commit to things, so if we wanted to learn an instrument, it was all the grades and all the theory.
I even have shoes that don't fit. They're just so cool, I wanted to have them.
One of mom's greatest acts of generosity was that she trained me to be defiant. Her great gift to me was encouraging me to be the person that I wanted to be, not the one that she and my father wished I was.
My mom just wanted me to do anything that was academic, whether it was become a doctor or be a lawyer. Engineering suited her... then I dropped out. It was not what I wanted to do at all; it just felt so unnatural, and I couldn't put my finger on why. I just knew it wasn't for me.
No, actually 'The Host' was totally a palate-cleanser for me. I wanted to do something a little bit different than romantic love. Romantic love is in there, obviously, because I enjoy writing about that and living it a lot.
I was from very poor people: 11 of us in a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. I wanted the large houses, the cars, jets, and yacht.
I still am not a size two - I don't think I could get there if I wanted to.
I picked up the guitar at 12 yrs old - basically, my mother and father bought it for me for Christmas. I played one at my friend's house; when I say played it, I just played around with it at my friend's house. It just struck me as something I really wanted.
I did, like, one or two plays in high school, but I don't think I realized I wanted to do comedy until I got to college, and I started doing improv and saw the Upright Citizens Brigade perform and did workshops with them.
I just dove into the Scriptures and started memorizing different scriptures and started becoming as much as possible a part of the scripture. I wanted it to be grafted into my heart.
Remember Robin Williams's great work as the voice of the genie in Disney's 'Aladdin'? Because he wanted to leave something wonderful behind for his kids, he said, he did the voice for a cut-rate fee of $75,000, far below his usual $8 million payday. But then something happened: The movie became a huge hit, raking in $504 million.
Growing up, I wanted to be Chris Evert.
I always wanted to be a 'Blue Peter' presenter when I grew up!
When I got signed, I wanted to be involved in a charity, but it was hard because I didn't know which problems to start with.
I wanted to play a TV detective because it's a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven't done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended.
I went to my school careers counselors and said I wanted to be an actor, and they didn't know what to do. They showed me catalogues with pretty campuses and said, 'Oh, look, there's a theater building. Why don't you go there?'
I knew I wanted to do something creative, and you don't necessarily go to Harvard to do that. It's not the best choice for creative writing.
My wife came into my life, and my mother still wanted to be the boss.
Someone had an eye on me as I was leaving high school. I had a chance to record demos, but they were kind of wanting to make a pop singer out of me, of the 'X Factor' variety. I didn't feel comfortable with it. I wanted to be a songwriter.
When I was a kid, I desperately wanted more background information on especially cartoonists.
My art teacher was really encouraging me, because he really liked that I could draw. I felt very torn. At that time, I had to pick one, and I felt much more confident in the arts than I did in chemistry. My big thing was that I actually wanted to be like Jacques Cousteau.
When I first moved to New York, I had some colleagues who said I should be my straightest self - whatever that means - when I went into casting offices, but I didn't want to put on an act of what I thought was heterosexual. I just wanted to be myself, and I'm very grateful because I feel like I've been embraced for that.
There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'
I think my least favorite hair color was the hair color that I had in 'Pitch Perfect 2.' They really wanted me to be dark red, and I wanted to be lighter like I was in the first movie, but they didn't want that. But I rocked some light red for a year, after it faded.
Well, I jumped for the first time when I was 16. I just loved it and immediately realized that it was what I wanted to do.
