When I buy a Nikon camera, I have no tolerance for the instructions. I'm ready to make some mistakes using it and get some bad pictures back until I've figured it out for myself.
— Sean Penn
You're always having to live more to fuel something new. It's an obligation to yourself and to the audience. The personal baggage that comes with being a known actor just adds to that struggle.
Turning one's back on stardom might be the highest form of common sense. One that I would aspire to be more complete with.
We've let the blade of our innocence dull over time, and it's only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.
There is a strength of character in the people who have, by and large, never experienced comfort.
I am a Justin Timberlake fan.
The thing that's very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing's very different.
I love stories about people who are smart enough to know that what they're doing is destroying them, but that knowing that doesn't help them.
I live in the energy and rhythm of the character. To some degree, that's true of every actor I've worked with.
Selling a movie feels like a hustle to every bone in my body. Many actors have careers dominated by modeling. They're all over the place. It turns me off. People who are good at what they do ought to practice something bigger.
When I was growing up and somebody like Robert De Niro had a movie come out, it was a cultural event. Because he had such a confidence and a single mission that was so intimate.
I just want real creative freedom without worrying about, you know, car payments.
The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.
Yeah, I had a tremendous time shooting in Nebraska. I like that state a lot, all over it.
I don't have any particular excitement about working with any specific director or actor at this point.
I've never really been one to get what they call stage fright so much.
I like to believe that love is a reciprocal thing, that it can't really be felt, truly, by one.
I'm always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it.
Whatever one considers art to be, there is in many people a hunger to express themselves creatively and to feel authentic in doing that.
Haiti kind of gets a hold of you.
I've been a road-rat since I got my driver's licence at 16, so I've probably gone across America 20 times.
I can always see light in any situation. It's just the way I'm made.
I cannot tell you that I ever fell in love with the theater as an audience. I fell in love with the theater as an actor for a period of time, but I have struggled as an audience, and I struggle more now than then. I was always a movie guy.
A lot of critics sometimes get into analyzing the way actors direct versus non-actors directing. And they really always miss it. It's one of those things where, by not being practitioners, they just came up with something that made sense to them.
I'm a huge Woody Allen fan. Good movie, bad movie, it doesn't matter - I just like his movies.
Craft comes into acting later rather than sooner. I was somebody who had to learn through a process - a natural actor doesn't need to.
In school, I was a genius of the year preceding the year I was in, every year.
In my teens, I fell in love with the movies.
I don't consider myself specifically political, you know? I think of working as an actor as being a human thing. The concerns I have that fall into politics are human concerns.
I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned, except my family, and it was so liberating. I didn't have a bad moment about it. It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things.
At this stage, what would be rewarding would be for audiences to want to watch.
There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies.
I think life's an irrational obsession.
Marriage ain't easy, but it's great most of the time.
Hal Holbrook was in one of my first television movies when I was about 18 or 19. He'd made such a strong impression on me and a lasting one in terms of what being an actor was.
I can make a better living as an actor than I can as a director. Though I certainly would prefer to be directing movies.
Putting something in a movie because it's in the news doesn't make it political to me. If you're not going outside the same old, same old, if you're not pushing the envelope, then you're not doing anything. A good movie is a political thing.
Anger can be a problem, but it has tremendous potential, too. It's just figuring out what to do with it.
I'll tell you what I probably would prefer to happen less and less: actors that I know and respect in shampoo ads. Or modeling.
I consider myself fortunate that in my home, acting or the creative arts were a good option. This was a respected tour of duty in my family. Acting wasn't something that was left to tragic bohemians. But we weren't a family that obsessed on cinema.
When you act in a film, you're inevitably surrounded by people you didn't choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I'm waking up to in the morning that's going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what's interesting to me at that stage in my life.
'The Indian Runner' was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.
I choose movies that I think will speak to what's important.
There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved by someone. As I look back over my life in romance, I don't feel I've ever had that.
I am a limousine liberal.
I've always operated under the notion that audiences don't always know when they're being lied to, but that they always know when they're being told the truth.
I think that I've still not been successful at playing the role of the retired actor, and I'd like to work on that.
I think you start to prepare the minute you read something.
Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.
That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it's pure, it means that they do too.
