Michael Shannon Quotes
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I've always been happy just to be working. It doesn't really matter for me how many people are familiar with my name or my picture, or whatever.
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I've never worried about anything in my life a fraction of the way I worry about my daughter. It's much more than hoping people like the play you're in, or that your outfit doesn't look bad. It's the real deal.
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What I'm angry about, and I've gone on record saying this, is I think that financiers get away with murder. They realize they can get something for nothing and they won't settle for anything else. There's something called a Schedule F. If I work for a Schedule F contract that basically means I'm doing the movie for free because by the time I pay all my commissions and taxes there's barely anything left for me to live on. This whole notion that you do work that you love for very little money and then you go out and do something you hate to make money.
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You got to know what's worth keeping and what's worth letting go.
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I just look at it as a real group activity when you are making movies. There are so many different artists doing so many different things, and they are all interconnected. So I like to see what everybody else is going to bring to the table before I make up my mind too much about anything.
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I like to play characters that get to do it all - to have a bit of comedy here and a bit of pathos here and a bit of suspense here, that's what's fun.
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I'll tell you what's funny about it [NSA wiretapping]: They tell us we got to cut the budget; we have to have budget rollback. We're going to cut the budget on air traffic control, and every once in a while your plane is going to be delayed for three hours. But we do have the money laying around to hire people to read your emails and listen to your phone conversations. That just doesn't make any friggin' sense at all.
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The stage is a routine. It keeps you grounded, like a metronome. I find that soothing.
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I think improv training really orients you to character development, more than taking a Strasberg class or Meisner class. Not only is it about developing character really quickly, but it's also about being a good partner in the scene.
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Plenty of people are onto the emptiness but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
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If you don't fight the system, you can either take advantage of the system or let the system take advantage of you.
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If you give me enough time, enough leash, I can become pretty reasonable.
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Inevitably people will get tired of me. People get tired of everyone except Jimmy Stewart. I'm not saying Jimmy Stewart would get tired of me, I'm just saying people will never get tired of Jimmy Stewart.
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I have been acting for over 20 years and I started in the smallest little theater that you can possibly imagine and then I very slowly built myself to this point. So it is never like there is this real sharp change or something that really startled me. It has just been very gradual.
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I don't pick my roles by genre; that's kind of silly.
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A lot of times people will send me stuff. They will find something and they will send it to me and then I will take a look at it. Every once in awhile I will go on IMDB for 10 or 15 minutes and look around. But I am not a huge gearhead. I don't even have my own computer. I use my girlfriends.
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I just keep working on things I like, and hope for the best. I hope people enjoy them.
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I guess if there's one thing that might surprise people about me, it's that I'm very obedient. I'm kind of like a dog. I look at acting as kind of a service industry. You're there to serve the writer and the director. I don't really look at it as an act of self-expression, like I'm going to say what's on my mind.
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It's always very daunting to play someone who actually existed. You have to honor that, and be specific and accurate and try to make people believe that you're that guy, which is really hard.
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Well, I think anybody who's had a baby can tell you that once you have a baby, they kind of become the main focus. I don't think there's gonna be a lot of room for anything else.
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Humility in this business [acting] isn't just a matter of being polite, it's kind of a matter of survival. You can't ever afford to think that you're the bee's knees, because you could always afford to be better. You have to always be searching for something better.
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A lot of times the characters I play tend to be kind of loners or they don't have best friends or best buddies.
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If you don't believe there's some organising principle, or somebody up in the sky pulling the strings, then it can be very stressful. And nature itself is very arbitrary - it's not malevolent or benevolent; it doesn't even know we're here.
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People don't go to the movies to get the news, people don't go to the movies to learn a lesson. People go to the movie to get an emotional experience.