The secrecy thing has gotten to be more and more prevalent in films, and maybe that's good. It's nice to go see a film and not know anything about it. Sometimes I feel like we know too much about films.
As far as acting in films, there is not much out there that is very interesting to do. The ones that are interesting to me are independent films and they have trouble raising money. With people putting their money into blockbusters, there is not much left for the independents.
I said to myself, 'I've waited a long time in my life to have a child, and I'm missing it, I want to continue to have a career, but not this way.
You want to move into worlds you've never been in before. It would be like going to the same restaurant all the time or going to the same place for vacation all the time. Where is the adventure in that?
My son was born somewhat late in my life and I just found myself really feeling like I didn't want to miss out on being a parent and being with him, and not wanting a situation where I was constantly pulled back and forth between being present, and having all these other pressures and considerations.
I'm about as healthy as a person can be. I quit smoking seven or eight years ago.
Idleness does drive me crazy, but I'd rather read or write than do anything just to work. A kind of respect has been instilled in me for acting: I love it too much to ever have a bad relationship with it.
I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?
In the theater, actors are the essential element of the work. In a film, it's a real collaboration - not that theater isn't, because it is - but it's a collaboration to such an extent that you can give a performance in film that sometimes you look at and you go, "Well, that's not the performance I was trying to give at all."
I try to offer as much as I can to the director so he has as much to work with as possible to create the character that, really, he wants to create in a sense.
As actors, the magic is in the almost spiritual experience to really enter another world, to really enter a belief of being in another person's shoes and to really take on their experiences as someone else has written them and imagined them. It's kind of a sacred thing. It's a very spiritual experience. That in itself for me is the main thing that keeps me coming back to it. I like to travel, but for me, this is the greatest travel.
Scripts are kind of a bare bones type of reading material.
There is a difference when you work with actors who have worked on the stage. When we're out there in front of an audience eight times a week, you can't do it on your own.
When independent films break through and actually make it into any level of mainstream-ness or get seen by people or find a life actually in theaters, it's extraordinary. And it doesn't happen that often.
I watch many, many, many independent films every year that you see once in a film festival and they're never heard of ever again. Many of them are very, very good.
I think it's very important that films like Bad Hurt don't get lost in the mix of the sci-fi-kill-everything-on-the-screen-blood-dripping-down-the-walls sort of the world of the cinema that we live in.
I was always drawn toward the Actor's Studio. I studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute when I first came to New York. One of my favorite teachers was one of Al [Pachino]'s teachers, a guy named Charlie Laughton, who was just a wonderful, wonderful man.
I was quite eager to work, anytime somebody was offering me a job, if I liked the role. Because I was always very discriminating from the very beginning, in the sense that I had absolutely no problem saying no to jobs when they came along if somehow they didn't fit into my universe - whatever that was.
I have to say from an actor's perspective, to work with a director who has been an actor through most of their career is a pleasure. They generally have a very deep understanding of the process of what you're doing, of how you are building and exploring the character.
I'm always surprised when people say, "Oh, it got such mixed reviews." I guess I didn't read them.
I've had so many people just come up to me and say, 'When you came up on the screen, everybody in the theater applauded.' It's just so sweet, really.
