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My first car was kind of sad. My first car was when my parents had completely worn out their Toyota Corolla that they had for 16 years or something. They gave me, for my 19th birthday, this really ancient Toyota. So that was my first car. And I loved it. I thought it was amazing, and I drove it cross-country. It was not aesthetically appealing in any way. It was it fast. It did not handle well, but it lasted forever. I drove cross-country and back, and then I gave it to my sister, and she drove it for another 10 years.
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I'm magically delicious.
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You don't need other people to affirm that you're a valuable person.
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There is no trick to writing a believable love story, a heartbreaking scene or real-sounding dialogue. All you need is to tell the truth. It’s always heartbreaking.
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Have this Chet Baker movie coming out and in that situation, I went down the rabbit hole studying Chet Baker and being obsessed with the period and the music and the relationships and the dynamic, and everything, drug addiction. There was so much I wanted to get at to kind of get at the truth. With Regression, I was certainly in Alejandro's Amenabar hands.
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If I do three movies in a year, I don't feel like acting ever again.
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One of the things I can do is to try to put myself in different kinds of movies and that kind of subtly changes my work. By the time my obituary is written, I want there to be a great western and a great comedy.
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If you say to yourself, okay, I will not self-destruct. I don't have to be the most talented person. I don't have to be everybody's best friend, I don't have to be liked, I don't have to be successful, well, one thing I will not do is self-destruct. If you take that out, your chances for success just went up like 800 percent.
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Years ago I was going to play Chet Baker in another movie and I really felt drawn to that character and the script is good and I met with Robert and we seemed simpatico and we developed. But I had a real passion for that role and that brought me deep into that film 'cause I got the sense that Robert Budreau was going to really let me be creative inside this part.
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Nothing teaches you like getting leveled. And I got leveled in my early 30s. Nothing went exactly the way I thought it would.
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What I learned about acting, from my experiences directing, is why so many producers and directors don't like actors. You go through all of this work securing a location, figuring out how to get electricity there, how to get trucks parked where they need to be, and where catering is going to come from. And if the actors don't come up with some magic, it actually didn't matter. That creates a lot of animosity towards the actors.
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I like that there's a certain inherent drama to those jobs that is exciting to tell stories about and it's still real life. I'm a little less interested in the current fad of being obsessed with superheroes and things that are so out of the box.
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I auditioned for Robert Redford once and I was so starstruck I couldn't even speak. I had a mic wire at a screen test clipped to me and then I got kind of nervous and I paced in a circle and then took a step and tripped and fell on my face. You just have to forgive yourself and keep going on.
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You need to be a good screen partner. It's very meaningful to me to be a part of great acting performances.
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Everyone has to pay their child support, and no matter if you're a Hollywood actor or anyone else, it's always a little bit more than you want to pay.
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Your development as a person should coincide with your development in all aspects of your life.
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The thing that makes a great genre movie is one that's not just entertainment, not just horror or sci-fi or whatever. The ones I love are the genre pictures with some subversive message underlying it all.
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Set designers, costume designers, actors, writers, music, that's what is beautiful.
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Right now the only people I can really fall in love with are people who don't really, truly want me around. Now why do I do that?
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I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.
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Alejandro Amenábar is a very interesting filmmaker. I had really liked The Others, which was a movie he made with Nicole Kidman a few years ago. He made a very compelling case about how much he wanted me to be in this movie. Whenever a really passionate, talented filmmaker seems to have an interest in me, I take it very seriously because I like to work.
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Sometimes people, their creative drive comes from an energy to try to heal themselves.
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I believe in the healing restorative power of art and communication. And so that's probably my rule. But that doesn't apply to bedtimes. And stuff like that.
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And the joy of my job - and it's really true - is that it's constantly evolving and changing.