I was kind of confused. I thought, Well, if I get drafted, I'll go. Everybody was very concerned with it. I had friends who went. Some that came back and some that didn't.
I was so exhausted after fighting for the project for five years, shooting it was like the Bataan Death March.
I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It's about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me.
I'm probably satisfied with my career 80 percent of the time.
In this industry, the new owners prefer to kill anything they weren't responsible for.
Most of what gets made now, you laugh your way through, go home and forget you've seen it.
Sometimes I think I'm real predictable to myself and other times... you always wonder, Is this really what I wanted to do? Did I make a mistake? Should I be doing something else?
Take characters that Nicholson or De Niro play: they're not always tough.
There's a hysterical, tired sense of humor that comes after working 14 hours a day, six days a week. I like those things because they take the pressure off the constant stress.
These days, you can do a TV series for five years and all of a sudden be on top of the business. Features don't even run in theaters very long anymore before going right to television.
To people outside, they think, Gee, that's great. You get to go here and there. The other side of that is our expression, This is location, not vacation.
We had training camp for a week, and we used the actual military drills of that period. We didn't have to work out much after hours, because going up and down hills all day was a good workout in itself.
While I was doing these plays in the beginning, I wasn't getting paid. I thought of it more as a hobby. Then I realized how seriously a lot of these people took what they were doing.
You can't think that you're playing a villain, or you'll end up with a cartoon. You have to think about him as a person and a hero.
