If you were my agent and I was making $10 million a movie and made four movies a year, that means you have a salary of $4 million.
To me, the most important thing in life is to be a human being. Second is acting.
If what I think is God should come down today and says "I'm God, or the thing you call God, and you're never going to do any more movies. You're never going to do television. You're never going to do theater again in your life," I would just say "What are we doing? What is the next step?" That's how I try to approach it.
If I had the money, I would love to open up a movie theater that just played images and colors and beautiful music. For me, there's nothing like listening to a beautiful opera sometimes - on a record or seeing it live - just to be sleepy and let those beautiful voices take me somewhere I've never been before.
I love to fantasize still, as I did as a little boy. If I see a movie, I want to fantasize about what it's all about.
I've been very lucky and fortunate to meet people that are very inspirational in their spirits, too, and not just as filmmakers - in their personal life. I mean, Steven Spielberg is very inspirational just to sit down and talk for an hour, like Ingmar Bergman was. They know so much about life and, you know, movie-making, so it's just wonderful to be around those people.
My mentor, [Ingmar] Bergman, when we worked on stage, he said you can't convince a thousand people at the big stage where we were working. You can't convince everybody, but just pick one every night that you perform for and make sure that he or she will have an experience that alters their life in a more positive way. So, just one every night. That's worth all the struggle and screaming.
If you do a character, always make the character with a big question mark. Even if the character is very enigmatic and all over the place, make him always with a question mark, because if you turn a question mark upside down, like they do in South America in Spanish, then it becomes a hook.
When you introduce a character and show him for the first time, don't show him fully lit. Don't show him one hundred percent to the audience. Show maybe fifty percent or sixty percent so the audience can fill in the dark spots.
I started as a director, but I was too bored with actors. I preferred to act.
I usually say I might have a talent or I'm lacking a talent, because everyday, I must tell you, I thank whatever is up there or out there that I'm alive and that I get to do what I'm doing, and I think that sends off a lot of good vibrations in different directions.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, they make bad movie after bad movie.
I think in the modern world we really need to have movie theaters or places we can go in and rejuvenate ourselves. I think we'll have less problems with our souls and our health. I do that in my life, and I feel healthy and happy. I need those hours in the darkness where I used to spend time as a kid, sitting in a little closet in the darkness, listening to AM radio, having glowing paint that I illuminated, just sitting there, dreaming about anything, not being disturbed for an hour or two, just alone in the dark. I'm still that little boy in my brain.
I dislike those people that see an opera and say "Oh, they can't act it. They just sing. It's boring." Lean back and just listen to the voices.
There are some movies that I remember a couple of seconds and I want to carry those couple of seconds in my heart forever, or wherever it is, and that's worth it.
Storytelling is all about using the imagination, for me at least it is. That's why I'm bored sometimes to see movies. I'm bored to see TV. I never see TV. I see news sometimes. I'm sorry to say, I work in this business and I love working in it, but I haven't seen a movie in so many years.
As an actor, you have to do things out of passion sometimes. I'm not in it for a lot of money. But I only need one car, and I'd rather work with people I really do respect and admire. And if you walk that path, you don't get written about too much in the tabloids, and I'm good with that.
