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I realized early on that success was tied to not giving up. Most people in this business gave up and went on to other things. If you simply didn't give up, you would outlast the people who came in on the bus with you.
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Acting is not about competing. Acting is about cooperating. Acting is about collaboration. It's about your utility, your usefulness, your capacity to add to the work that has already been done and will be done. You're just part of a team. I never feel competitive about acting.
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The loss of anonymity is something that nobody can prepare you for. When it happened, I recognized that I'd lost one of the most valuable things in life. To this day, I'm not all that happy about it...
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What I found was an emotional consistency with him. The words, the scenes, the situations - I wasn't mimicking what I thought Branch Rickey's emotional reality would have been.
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American Graffiti was the first movie where the director let me have any input. It was the first time anyone ever listened to me. George thought my character should have a crew cut, but I wasn't happy with that idea. I'd always had pretty long hair back then - in college, particularly - so I told George my character should wear a cowboy hat. George thought about it and he remembered a bunch of guys from Modesto, California, who cruised around, like my character, and wore cowboy hats, so it turned out that it actually fit the movie.
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I realized early on that success was tied to not giving up.
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A bad guy in a movie has a lot of latitude for acting. He can walk up the wall, crawl across the ceiling, go piss in the corner and everybody will say, "Fantastic!" But somebody's going to have to catch that sucker. Somebody's going to have to play the guy who gets him in the end. And that's a better part.
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When we were making it Star Wars, none of the effects were in. So the first time, I thought it was, you know, that - I mean, we were surrounded by English crew members that could hardly keep themselves together. They were, "Here comes the guy in the dog suit." They made fun of us, which was OK. But the first time I was sitting in a theater, and I saw all the effects in, and the big ship flew over the audience, and the sound rumbled, I pretty much thought we were close to home.
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There comes a point when you've exhausted your opportunities playing good guys. I've been around long enough, I think I'm entitled to explore a bit. But what I saw there was an opportunity to play a character different from what the audience's expectation was. A chance to take their crude experience of me - of my iconography, if you will - and turn it on its ear at an appropriate juncture in the film to be useful to the process of telling the story.
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When I met scientists, I found them to be as various as any other group of people.
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There's no independent satisfaction without the success of the film itself. The feel that you have done the best you can to support the film.
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I saw what luck and success I had as an opportunity to twist it up and do something different, so I've always sought out different genres and different kinds of characters.
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The thing I always guard against when I'm talking to people I'm working with about a script is that there's a thing I don't like and it's called "talk story." It's when you're talking about the story; the characters are tasked with talking about the story instead of allowing the audience to experience the story.
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I'm still interested in perfecting whatever talents I have and continuing to grow as an actor and continuing to be useful to the telling of the story.
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I knew that there was an aspect to this story that was beyond the typical and that it was something very important about America, about our culture, and about bringing a story to a new generation that perhaps didn't know the details of it, and hadn't had the visceral experience that this film is 42.
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I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so nothing of what I was studying seemed to fit. I know now that I should have taken advantage of that time and that I missed a great deal of the opportunity to educate myself.
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[ Chadwick Boseman] is a remarkable actor, and he's a remarkable person.
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Chadwick Boseman work as an actor, I think, is truly remarkable, and I had a great time working with him.
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We have been led to believe that we have come a long way toward world nuclear disarmament. But that is not the case. Our government is not doing all that it could. We must urge our leaders to fulfill the obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United States must assume world leadership to end once and for all the threat of nuclear war. It is our moral responsibility.
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I don't take trouble at all to conform a screenplay to my iconography. I don't say, "We can't do that - the audience wouldn't accept it." I try to take the limitations of what is required to play a leading character and then screw with them.
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You know how a woman gets a man excited? She shows up.
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Acting was a way out at first. A way out of not knowing what to do, a way of focusing ambitions. And the ambition wasn't for fame. The ambition was to do an interesting job.
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I don't mind playing older characters. I find it interesting. There are parts I couldn't have got when I was 30 years old. So, it continues to interest me in the same way that it always did.
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It's not the years honey, it's the mileage.