Ethan Hawke Quotes
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I'm a huge Luc Besson fan. The Fifth Element, I just loved that movie. Luc cast me to play a small part in it, and so I did, because I love all his movies actually - The Big Blue, La Femme Nikita, Léon: The Professional. His movies are so wonderful. It's just fun to be in it and for it to be a sci-fi movie.
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Few years ago I did a movie, Good Kill, about drone pilots and for four or five months I'm obsessed with the Air Force.
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If you study the history of mankind, it seems to be a history of violence. Certainly the history of art, whether you look at paintings or movies or plays or whatever, is just a litany of murder and death.
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We all have this fantasy of finding our one true love who's going to be the perfect fit. It's just not a reality.
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It was fantastic to be on the set again with Denzel Washington and Antoine Fuqua and then to have the situation be so different. We weren't making a sequel to Training Day. We were in the middle of the desert riding around on some horses.
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All that stuff with the tabloids is a kind of luxury tax I pay for all the good things I do in my life.
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A good movie humanizes people.
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We're fascinated by things that scare us, and one of the things that scares us is violence. Violence exists. It's a real part of our lives. We are obsessed with what we're scared of, but it certainly doesn't define us.
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I'm horrified to admit that I just love Salinger. I was devastated to find out that other people feel the same way.
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And the best films feel like a fist punching you in the solar plexus and all elements of the filmmaking process - the acting, the design, the cinematography, the music, is all working to one end.
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I was being taken around by a press agent at the Venice Film Festival at age 18. Was it fun? Sure. But it was a dangerous path to be walking on as far as having a substantive life. Because the casualty rate at the Venice Film Festival for 18-year-olds? High.
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You can't keep wanting to be 20 years old. Everybody knows that, but what's in the next room?
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I got to work with Robert DeNiro once and it was a strange experience. Gwyneth Paltrow and I were doing Great Expectations movie together and we were complaining about what a mediocre film experience it was. DeNiro showed up on set and all of a sudden the director got better, the director of photography got better - everybody got more interested and excited. DeNiro isn't waiting for other people to create the environment that he wants, he brings it along with him.
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I don't know what has happened to movies, but lately every movie is at least 20 minutes too long. It used to be that if you were three hours long it was because it was epic - a movie about Gandhi; something with very important subject matters.
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Directing is like putting together a collage.
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I did this movie right after it about the life of Chet Baker. It's called Born to Be Blue. In that situation, there's a real clear character you're drawing on. It's a real person. It's really exciting and interesting to do the research to figure out how to make that a nuanced, three-dimensional human being.
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Nightmares are a strange thing. Your worst fear is sometimes something you enjoy thinking about, for some strange reason. I don't know why that is, but it's some kind of fantasy that people play out. "What would I do to protect my children? I'd do anything." And then, you watch it play out. I'm petrified of such a thing.
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Don't you find it odd," she continued, "that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try.
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People are conditioned to just you know, like, you know we're like little birdies going to the bird feeder you know, or the little cows going to the salt lick. We just like what we've seen before.
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Alejandro Amenábar has a unique way of approaching movies and thinking about something which was new to me. It was different. I have a lot of respect for him so I just took a gamble.
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Some people burn out, and some people like Clint Eastwood, he was a wild, international movie star in his 30s, and he's doing the best work of his life now. Go figure.
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It was when I was on the set of Dead Poets Society.There was actor,his name was Norman Lloyd. One day he took us all aside and said, "You guys don't even understand what a powerful experience you're having. You don't really understand what a gift this is." We were going, "What does he mean?" It was that really wonderful opportunities aren't to be taken for granted. I often found that it had embedded itself in my memory.
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I did this movie, Predestination, and it's one of my favorite movies I've ever made, because sci-fi really lets you talk about ideas in a way that's not pretentious.
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I've had different opportunities in my life, but I've tried to maintain the spirit of an amateur. Our culture roots everything in the barometer of success and how much money you make. But if you really just aspire to a life in the arts, it's really not a barometer at all.