I recently had a few days off while shooting a movie in Budapest, so I took a cab from the set to the airport, looked at the departure board, and decided where I wanted to go right then and there. I spent four days in Rome and didn’t tell anyone I was going.
‘Beatriz’ has been a slow burn; people are still finding the movie. It’s actually similar to the first few years of ‘Friday Night Lights.’
Food was supposed to be a slightly bigger part of ‘Heartburn,’ and it actually didn’t turn out to be because of me. I just didn’t find a way to make it a bigger part of the movie as I should have, and we cut several scenes in which food was a major character.
When ‘Mean Girls’ came out, I was 15. So I saw that movie and was like, ‘That is so funny.’ But it still has that fluffy, happy ending, and that doesn’t happen in high school.
It’s a very smart and heartfelt movie and that’s why, I think, we’re all drawn to it. We really showed up for this with this collective idea that it was really ambitious, but we felt we all really had something to gain from it.
I know what a good movie is.
It’s very liberating to be naked in front of a hundred people, but there’s nothing sexual about lovemaking on a movie set.
In all the background scores I do, I take care to see that the theme enriches the storyline and does not deviate from the mood of the scenes, context, characters and the entire movie.
I like the idea of movies having a magic element. How many times have you seen an actor in a movie who you know only as the character? It’s wonderful, isn’t it?
When I’m in New York, I just want to walk down the street and feel this thing, like I’m in a movie.
A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers.
A film is sort of binary – it either works or it doesn’t work. It has nothing to do with how good a job you do. If you bring it up to an adequate level where the audience goes with the movie, then it works, that is all.
I use Pureology Shampoo and Conditioner, and after shampooing, I’ll put the conditioner on, go watch a movie, and wash it out later. When you have black girl hair, once we wash, we’ve gotta do the whole press and get in the edges and everything. That’s a lot of heat to go back to straight on a daily basis.
I’d love to work with Gerry Butler, Alan Cummings, and Ewan McGregor. It’d be amazing if we could do a Scottish Hollywood movie.
I think everything that you do, you’re learning. I mean, every movie that you make is like a film school; that’s one of the things that I enjoy about filmmaking.
The movie, ‘Remember the Titans,’ is my favorite movie, staring Denzel Washington. I love the way in this movie the game of football brings those boys together, it unites those boys on that football field. It unites a whole town, black, white, old, young, rich and poor.
I grew up on movie sets, getting to see storytelling happen up close.
This is my first wuxia movie and I must consider this before trying to make something with my own.
I remember, as I was hovering around 40, I thought each movie would be my last, really.
‘Be Cool’ was a defining movie for me.
Moana doesn’t have a love interest because this movie is about a journey – a physical one across hundreds and hundreds of miles of ocean, but also an emotional one of Moana finding herself. She doesn’t need a man or love interest to find herself.
I want to wear school uniforms. I want to do something like the movie ‘Our Times.’
My natural color is dark blond, but right now I like being a brunette. I did a movie last summer and they dyed my hair platinum – I hated it.
When it comes to romance, I’m really simple. I am really a ‘dinner and a movie’ type of person, and I love food, so surprise me and order something different or adventurous when it comes to food, and I’m like a kid at Halloween.
I want to write, direct, produce, but in steps. I want to take steps. I don’t want to just jump in because I sold a lot of records and just feel like I can jump into the movie world. Naw, I want to learn the movie world like I learned the music world.
Dude, I didn’t say Jude Law can’t act. I didn’t say Jude Law was in bad movies. I just said he’s in every movie.
My goal is to make a movie that no one would sort of expect me to make.
From the point of view of being in the public radar, comedians have less problems than other actors. Action movie stars like Stallone or Schwarzenegger usually attract the more aggressive fans.
When I first envisioned ‘Funny Games’ in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.
Rapunzel is a bit more relatable than the other princesses, especially because she doesn’t even know that she’s a princess until the very end of the movie. I like to think of her as the bohemian Disney princess. She’s barefoot and living in a tower. She paints and reads… She’s a Renaissance woman.
My first movie was this independent that I did on the Erie Canal in 1995, called Erie, that I don’t know if you could even get, actually with Felicity Huffman. And then from that I did this film that was eventually called The Broken Giant later that fall. And then I kind of started getting into doing pilots.
I tried to get a baseball movie made a couple of years ago and I don’t think it didn’t happen because I was a woman, but because sports movie don’t sell internationally.
I like an interesting movie even if it’s controversial or offensive, depending on your taste.
The song ‘Tyler Durden’ is about the movie ‘Fight Club,’ so obviously, it’s not a personal experience, but I love that song. It’s my favorite song.
I wasn’t going to have fun doing a teen movie again.
Just making a good movie is hard to do.
My ‘Pearl Harbor’ story is that I’ve never seen it, and I suspect that I was cut completely from the movie, but my name is fairly high in the credits at the end. So, anybody that’s ever said that they saw me in Pearl Harbor, I think they just saw the list of credits at the end of the movie.
In every movie, there’s always some physical thing that triggers the character for me. In ‘The Long Walk Home,’ it was the girdle. Every time I’d put that girdle on, I’d feel my character wiggle to life.
If you’re a movie actor, you’re on your own – you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.
One of the scariest moments was being on Tyler Perry’s first movie, ‘Diary of a Mad Black Woman.’
A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.
‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’ is one of the first unrated movies to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. But many video stores won’t take a movie that’s not rated, so I had to make the movie an R.
‘Shogun’ was a mini-series, so even though it went on television, we filmed it like a movie.
I have this set-up at my house where I have one big movie theater screen that’s 9 ft. by 16 ft. Then, I have nine 63-inch monitors around it; four on either side and one underneath. So I get all nine one o’clock games, and I can switch them onto the big screen. That’s what I do on the Sundays during the season.
When I auditioned for ‘Pitch Perfect,’ I didn’t know it was a singing movie. I didn’t read the script. I go to the audition, and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s a baseball movie.’ But then I’m reading the lines, and I’m like, ‘This doesn’t seem like a baseball movie.’
‘Home Alone’ was a movie, not an alibi.
When I show up to act in a movie for somebody else, I just want to be nice and helpful and do what they want because I know how difficult it is to make a movie. I don’t want to cause any problems. So you show up and do your job, and I think if a director understands that, you don’t make a lot of demands.
Playing Etta James in the movie ‘Cadillac Records’ really changed me. It was a darker character, and I realized that if anything is too comfortable, I want to run from it. It’s no fun being safe.
I got my first blockbuster break for the movie ‘Cocktail,’ where I sang ‘Second Hand Jawani.’
I really like conducting my music in concerts because I’m convinced it’s not just for films; it has its own life. It can live far away from the images of the movie.
I have met Jackie Chan about 6 times up ’til now… and even though many people think we are natural enemies, I personally think he is a cool bloke and would honestly love to work with him in a film one time – that would a well brilliant movie!
I feel like every conversation with my father is like an M. Night Shyamalan movie; 90 minutes of build-up to no payoff.
You know how to tell if the teacher is hung over? Movie Day.
It’s OK if Tim McGraw goes and does a movie, and it’s OK if Justin Timberlake does a movie, but it’s not OK for an actor to become a singer. I never understood that.
I never understood why anyone would do magazines. Like, why would someone put their face out there so much? It’s because those people reading magazines will go see the movie, so you do it.
‘The Exorcist’ is one of the finest movies ever made, and it just so happens to be a scary movie.
When I was a kid, it wasn’t very often that I could go to the movies and see an entire movie carried on the shoulders of someone who looked like me.
