I like female directors that gravitate toward masculine things. I think the danger of a male director is the over-fetishization of the masculinity.
— James Ransone
Sometimes actresses are just insane.
The scariest movies, to me, are like Michael Haneke's 'Amour.'
There's a bunch of cities I'm not crazy about, but I love Chicago. I love the musical history - the mid-'90s indie rock scene, Chicago house music. It's a great town.
There is no external means, whether it's my career, or money or house or a wife or anything, that is going to set me right.
'Generation Kill' was not a very glamorous shoot. For all intents and purposes, it was low budget, and all the money they had went to what you see on the screen.
I like theater; I just don't really like actors.
Idris Elba saved my butt in a point in my career that he can do whatever he wants, and I will back his decision no matter what. He got me one of my first pretty big studio gigs, and we had never worked together... It was a time in my life where I really needed it. So whatever Idris wants to do, I'm down with.
There used to be a period of time when you'd shoot big studio movies where you would shoot a couple of pages a day. For a TV show, you've gotta shoot seven to nine. The schedules are much more compressed.
I'm friends with a lot of Brits, and they tell me when they're over here what a huge phenomenon 'The Wire' has become. Some things just attain critical mass after they're already dead and buried, and I don't know why it was the case with 'The Wire'.
I probably don't make as much money as people think I make. I make more than the usual medium household. I'm one of the few middle class actors out there. The microcosm of Hollywood reflects the macrocosm of international finance.
I always make this comparison between Bob Dylan and David Simon. Not in the most flattering way possible - these two intellectual Jews who totally identify with the black man's struggle!
Any new country I go, I realize the less I know, and the luckier I feel.
I try not to be super self-referential about my work because it becomes like navel gazing at a certain point.
Just because I try to read a lot of stuff doesn't mean I can fully conceptualize all of these intense, big, abstract ideas.
I'm not going to say I'm really streetwise, but I might be more than most people.
Drama is easy to fool people with, but you can't trick people into laughing.
I think all art - if it's good - is a result of really trying to create something that you can't put into words. Where language ends is where good art begins.
My father was a Vietnam vet, and he was Green Beret.
Animals are a continuous source of inspiration and wonder to me. I would love to play a dog.
In my twenties, I was a huge, insane risk-taker.
A lot of my world-view is formed by the places I've been.
I can usually play polarizing characters.
Can I be a leading man? I don't believe myself to be; I don't think that I am, but I'm in this place as a performer where I think about how to make things smaller, more subtle.
Corporate greed in New York won. It suffocated anything interesting out of the city.
I just auditioned for 'The Wire' like I just auditioned for any other job.
The characters I play always seem eerily appropriate to where I am in my personal life at the time, and if they're not, there always tends to be this notion that I should be learning something to apply to my own life from these people.
Baltimore breeds a really specific type of weirdo. Animal Collective is from Baltimore. Dan Deacon, John Waters. There's a through line of weirdness and a hard edge that I see when I meet people from that area.
I don't end up playing a lot of likable characters, so I find myself living in a lot of unlikable skin. As a result of that, I don't always feel good. I get a lot more catharsis from taking pictures or painting or making short films.
Mars would seem, to me, to be the best place to focus our collective effort as a species... I think people would like to experience something sort of hopeful in terms of where we go next... as a species.
Music is a very, very powerful tool that filmmakers use to sway people into emotions that they intend you to feel.
Anyone who lives like a modern aristocracy, the last thing they exhibit is a sense of gratitude. Me, I'm very fortunate.
I'm such a hater, and will hate on anything.
