I just love the process of working with other actors.
All the choices we make in our life are pointless. There’s no escaping the inevitable.
People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.
My point was that it's hard to make good films, but I'm not under any illusion that you do all the time.
Roy, the guy I play in 'The Grifters,' is a guy who had a very bleak life. His mother had him at 13, and then when she was 17 or 18 and he was 4 or 5, they were trapped in a small Texas town somewhere, and she was ready to do anything to get out.
The ages two to 15 I spent at different stages of shortness. I didn't become a tall person until I was 16.
Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.
Well, any time you do anything good, it's man versus himself, right? That's the art, the challenge.
I think being self-referential is really narcissistic. Who's to say anybody's even thinking of you that much? But some of these movies that I've done, people still recite lines to me, even 20 years later.
If people are constantly reading about you, and you're overexposed, they've got no reason to go see your movies. Also, it's not pleasant or nice to have your privacy invaded.
A lot of people are not meant to be together.
Hitler was so modern, in that he was obsessed with being famous. He was caught up with this rush to be have achieved greatness before turning 30.
You can only really judge yourself in comparison to other people. How bad you are, but you're not as bad as someone else. So it's degrees of losing.
I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.
I wanted to just be a filmmaker, and I thought I wanted to do all the aspects, and it seemed like as a producer was the best way to do it, because I could have... You never have control on a movie, but you have as much control as you can. You can push it through, and you can hire the right people.
Satire is meant to have teeth; satire is meant to be dangerous. But it also happens to be fun because subversion and telling the right kind of people to go to hell is supposed to feel good.
It never hurts to be involved in any political or activist organization. I can never see how participation would be a bad thing. The key is being true to what you participate with and who.
In the United States, we can talk about ISIS, but we can't talk about Palestine.
If you help manufacture an enemy that's really evil, you can point to the fact that it's really evil, and say, "Hey, it's really evil."
I think it's very improtant and healthy to tell differnt stories than the corporatist narratives we are being asked to swallow hook, line and sinker.
These people say free markets are the way to go, but wink, wink, the markets aren't really free. They're just a protectionist racket, and we have to pay for it all on every level. It's really quite extraordinary, and immoral, and illegal. These things need to be named, and shamed, and outed, and mocked, and prosecuted.
I think any actor can probably identify with being a professional liar. You don't always look at yourself that way, but I know a lot of days I do.
When you see a culture where the intellectual architects of the invasion are not shamed for their behavior but rewarded within the mainstream media culture, black comedy, satire, absurdism is the only response.
It's supposed to feel good to throw a brick at the right people. There is a long tradition of naming and ridiculing and shaming and calling the villains what they are. Usually it was the artistocracy of the day and satire was the only way to speak truth to power.
I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.
