I would come home from school every Wednesday, order pizza, and watch 'X-Files.' I was devoted.
— Ben Foster
We've all been influenced by American naturalism, and to ignore that entirely would be impossible for me as someone who works primarily in film.
I like physical jobs. I like moving my body around. I like testing it. Lets you feel like you've done something.
Transcendental Meditation, for me, has been a way of turning down the outside racket and turning up the bandwidth of instinct, intuition, concentration, attention. On the light ends, it's a power nap. On the strong ends, it's a giant battery, and that battery doesn't run out.
I don't think I'm particularly shy. I just don't like being front and center as myself.
Usually, I'll drop twenty to forty per cent of the dialogue - you can do so much with gesture. I'm still waiting to do a silent film.
I'm learning not to hold on so tightly to my solitude. It's not an economical way to work. A driver would call it 'white-knuckling.' If you're holding on to the wheel so tightly, it's gonna lock up your driving. Releasing myself from trying to control everything has been part of growing up.
The roles I'm interested in or have been interested in, you know, it's going to get down to conflict. Drama is conflict - conflict of interests.
The heat around young actors burns out. Natural ability and magnetism only get you so far. The rest is hard work.
I don't like to rehearse, and the film-makers that I have been drawn to are interested in provoking something between people rather than nailing a scene in advance.
The Tour de France is a wicked sport in the way that it's not just man against man or woman against woman; it's not flesh against flesh. It's flesh against machine.
There's a lot to learn from the family of a soldier as much as the soldier. Actually, 'warrior' is a better word.
I think a long-term TV show is probably not for me, but doing a few years of something could be interesting.
I don't watch most of the movies I'm in. Ever. They're like a bad relationship where, after you break up, you don't want to look over all the valentines.
I'm not going to beat this life. It's gonna get me in the end. So accepting that is a real freedom and finding a joy in working that I haven't allowed myself before.
Every job is a blessing. Everyone has to take into account what is available. Are you paying rent, who do you get to work with? There are a lot of variables in the job. What I'm drawn to is things that I don't completely understand maybe, and want to get a better feel for it.
We live in this thought web; we identify things and put them away and distance ourselves from them. But to be completely present? That is source, that is art, that is spirituality. And meditation is a way to defy fear and experience that source.
I'm so sick of sarcasm and irony, I could kill! Sincerely, the real root of things is love and sacrifice.
We've turned film into such an industry that we pursue naturalism just by shaking the camera and cutting the film to ribbons to provoke a bogus sense of documentary. But we haven't done the homework. To push the depth that the Actor's Studio did or the Russian theatres did with their actors is to rehearse, to spend time, to dig, to excavate.
My job is all about defending the people that I play.
Once you're in the presence of people who have put their lives actively on the line, repeatedly, you're never allowed to complain again. And I do, and we all do. But now I look at things a little differently.
'A Streetcar Named Desire' is one of the best, if not the best, modern American plays. It deals with family dynamics, mental health, PTSD, war, and love. It's hard to beat.
People tell me I look angry. I thought my dad was mad at me his whole life, but it turns out that was just his mug - and I inherited it.
My heroes were always Looney Toons, Robin Williams, the Three Stooges. I think everything I do is kinda funny. I think I'm sort of ridiculous.
I have a lot of respect for, always dig, the crew. Sometimes a lot more than the cast. But a good run production team is paramount to making a good film. You just can't it done without a good line producer, without creative producers, without people who are making stuff happen.
It's okay to fail 'cause there's no failure, you're just informing the richness of your experience, and that's - that's the greatest gift you can possibly give yourself.
