The enemies of acting are mood and attitude and other general homogenized disruptive entities. Whereas acting is about action - doing - and unless you can figure out a way to craft in an imaginative reality to which you don't submit, you're going to be out of control. You'll flip out. The job is to be surprised.
Great risks come in long term, tremendously assiduous, very courageous study.
I think acting can bring you closer to yourself and help you understand other people.
But I am not going to live for ever. And the more I know it, the more amazed I am by being here at all.
I'm coming from the notion that acting is an art. It is not a business. It is about building characters, not about selling personalities.
Heroes to me are guys that sit in libraries. They absorb knowledge and then the risks they take are calculated on the basis of the courage it took to become replete with knowledge.
You can only sit on the frustration of wanting to express something for so long.
Being a father, being a friend, those are the things that make me feel successful.
I demand minimal for paid rehearsal and not always six weeks either.
The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.
It just seems like that because I do a lot of independent films that don't get to the mainstream.
I am constantly asked, 'What's the difference between acting in the theater and acting in film?' The only answer I can give is the space - you adapt to the space. But acting is acting.
I'm not going to party. I'm going to go do something that will make me break a sweat.
Not to be offensive, not to be capricious, not to be arbitrary, not to be neurotic, not to be an actor outer, you're just trying to get in and you're given so little time to get in gently, but it's always hard.
The thing is David is also aware of everything and it's not like you're going somewhere the director is not.
I grew up in the South Pacific. Basically, my brothers were Guamanian. I spoke words of Guamanian long before I spoke words of English, and so I've seen a lot. You know, I've traveled in places where people don't have the benefits of American life. And so I've seen a lot of stuff.
I don't have any artifacts of my profession in my house; the Oscar is in storage.
Where did I study? I went to P.S. 6. I went to Collegiate, Middlesex, Tufts, Juilliard.
I want to prove a point. That point is, actors are artists, not narcissists necessarily.
It was the moment I learned acting is not acting out. After that light went on, I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out how to make other people realize it.
