I believe that anything in this world is fair game for a creative exercise.
Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.
Be really picky with your hiring, and hire the absolute best people you possibly can. People are the most important component of almost every business, and attracting the best talent possible is going to make a huge difference.
Hollywood is not stupid, contrary to popular belief; it's really a lot of intelligent people trying to figure things out.
I somewhere along the way became fascinated with exploring characters who are willing to put themselves into violent situations, whether it's football, hockey, boxing, being a cop, being a soldier. There's not a lot of people who are willing to put themselves into those situations.
It's always funny to me how your movie becomes no longer yours and people interpret it how they want and react how they want to react to it, and it's fun to kind of watch that happen.
You know to me, being a good actor, the most important quality is you've got to love to play, and to just be open to anything.
I'm much more collaborative than I probably was when I was first starting, much more willing to say, "I don't know the answer to that." I have really talented people and let them do their jobs and not try to control everything as much as I did when I was starting. I was a bit more insecure.
We're both [with Mark Wahlberg] capable of being sarcastic, vicious, violent lunatics, but we hold each other in check, appeal to the best aspects of each other.
I've had great success and I've had catastrophic failure. It's really how you handle the rough stuff that defines you, I think.
Working with composers often is a really frustrating experience because you speak a different language and, oftentimes, they take two or three jobs, at the same time. They're difficult and pretentious and they're tormented artists.
You look for inspiration, I do, that got me going.
Every movie has its own unique series of challenges.
I have a tradition of working with actors, over and over again. I've worked with Jason Bateman, over and over again. You get to know an actor, and you get a certain trust and a comfort, and you become really good friends, and you feel like you've got a short-hand.
I tend to not have to handle things that are probably gonna end up being irrelevant, that aren't gonna have much to do with the film. I have probably a better understanding of really what does matter, when to pick my battles and when to kind of let them go.
I think I've been fortunate enough to have a fairly long career and hopefully I'm at the middle of it now. And I think I'm starting to develop a certain amount of experience and a certain amount of wisdom about kind of what really matters and what doesn't matter.
I'm pretty upfront about my love and admiration for the military. One of the perks of making movies is that you get to sort of follow your own passions, and I believe quite passionately that we don't pay enough attention and respect to our veterans. Not just our wounded veterans, but all veterans.
One of the challenges assembling the film was that gun fight went on for three and a half hours and we obviously couldn't spend three and a half hours of the film with one gun fight. It was trying to figure out the balance of how much an audience could take before they either became repulsed or desensitized or bored or just overwhelmed.
I try to preload as little as I can. I like to come to the set with minimal preparation.
I did not want 'Battleship' to be perceived as an American war film. I wanted to do everything I could to make the film accessible to a global audience. It felt like bringing an alien component to the film would help take the American jingoism out of it.
Truth is, we offered it to Tom Hanks, which pretty much every movie in America does, but Tom passed. Billy Bob said that Hanks recently called and said he's voting for all of us for Oscars, he loved the film.
What kind of town do we want in the future, and how are we going to plan on that?
People know I love to shoot action and that I'm not afraid of emotion.
I've been a big believer in musicians turned actor, going back to Sinatra winning the Oscar for 'From Here To Eternity.' David Bowie in 'Man Who Fell to Earth,' Kris Kristofferson's been great in a bunch of films. Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Mariah Carey, I thought was great in 'Precious.
I don't like alien films where you don't get to see the aliens.
