Thomas Jane Quotes

I'm of the mind that life is a risk. Every time you leave your house it's a risk, and I see no reason to go through life with my hands tied behind my back for any reason. I'd be foolish to let something stop me from doing what I love to do.

I think what makes us human is our interconnectedness among people. It's our ability to form and maintain relationships. It's the barometer by which we call ourselves human.

People lose people, we lose things in our life as we're constantly growing and changing. That's what life is is change, and a lot of that is loss. It's what you gain from that loss that makes life.

Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.

I like filmmakers where, if their film comes on and you step in halfway through it, you can recognize that, hey, this is a Coen Brothers film. Or, hey, this is a Stanley Kubrick movie. You can recognize some filmmakers. Like, if you put on a Sam Raimi movie, you can tell that it's a Sam Raimi movie pretty quickly. I like a signature style that people can recognize and relate to, and connect with. I think that is part of why we seek out certain directors. We want to see how they view the world.

Stuff that happens to you in your life when you're shooting a TV show, you have to be careful, because it might end up in the show. And that's what I think is the neat thing about TV: how alive it is, and how the writers respond to the stimulus that they're getting from the actual actors. Whereas a movie is more hermetically sealed.

I just have a respect for my audience. That seems to be pretty logical.

I don't like to stick to one formula. That gets boring. I get bored, so I want to try different ways of getting inside something.

I do know that people tend to do their best work when they're challenged and stimulated by their peers.

When I was a kid out here in L.A., I was homeless, I didn't have any money and I was living in my car. I wasn't averse to going down to Santa Monica Boulevard and letting a guy buy me a sandwich. Know what I mean?

Harrison Ford - one of my favorite actors - has a wonderful sense of character and depth and uniqueness to him, yet he's able to just deliver the lines without putting any English on it.

It's not that the film is violent, it's that people have an issue with violence right now.

Earlier on in my career I felt that I had to hide behind a lot of different masks, and showboat ways of performing. Now, that's a lie. The less I have to hide, the less I have to act.

Sharing the same vision for what's on the page is always a good idea. The director's job is to establish what that is and make sure that everyone sticks to it when it comes down to actually executing it.

When I was doing character films, I would always try to find something to subvert the standard. You know, to play them exactly for what they are. That's the fun for me.

You just have to go with a good story and a script that you like and people that you like to work with.

We're in the doing business, or acting business and creating business. We're not in the results business, so we don't have any control over what the result is.

I like to imagine that all the choices you make during the day that you're doing a particular scene are going to feed into the creation of that scene. It's not a movie-by-movie or a part-by-part basis. It's a day-by-day thing, and sometimes an hour-by-hour thing.

Most actors have a process that they can go through, that they rely on, or that they've discovered, and that can evolve from project to project.

I think all good drama is funny. All the best drama is ultimately very funny. Life is funny. You can't have any honest treatise on life without bumping into some humor.

Creating a world in a sci-fi show is almost the whole battle. If you have a great story and you can create a great world, as far as the acting goes, it makes my job a whole lot easier.

Television is kind of restrictive in its directing, but it would be nice to get some chops doing TV.

If I have things my way, over the next few years, I'm going to be doing a lot more directing and a lot less acting. That will be fun for a while.

Anything that has to do with noir and space, I'm gonna love. When you've got a noir-ish, pulpy detective in a science fiction show, I'm all in, in that regard.

Great directors turn in mediocre work and first-time directors turn in exceptional work. No matter how good a person can talk about what he wants, you never know.