On his son's skateboard accident: "My son had a skateboard accident where he almost died. He had emergency brain surgery. This was before he turned eighteen — he’s nineteen now. And when he was recovering, seeing the morphine go into him and give him relief created kind of a love affair for me with morphine and that usage of it. It had already been eight months of divorce and sh*t, and raising a kid that’s going through the divorce himself, and then this f–king thing happens. He’s 100 percent now, no brain damage — he’s great. Got a few scars, but he’s great. But it was a tough, tough time. When he got out of the hospital and he’s with his mother after being with me for six months, I thought, Wow, I can actually go on a date. And so I go out and I strike out four nights in a row, drinking at a bar and ending up home, you know, drunk. And on the fourth day I said, ‘I could just go sit in the middle of the bed and watch TV at four in the afternoon, too. I don’t have anything.’ My daughter’s eighteen and she’s doing her thing, my son’s with his mother. So I turned on the TV and there was this earthquake in Haiti."
On the movie industry: “In my teens, I fell in love with the movies. And so when I got involved in the movies, I was a genius in terms of how the movies that were made in the generation that inspired me got made — but now the financing wasn’t there to do ‘em anymore. Trauma. I’m caught in a business that I’m in love with the idea of — the whole process that’s possible. Only now they’re not making movies — they’re representing them.”
On working with young actors: "I don't know the young actors as well, I'm not as aware of who's out there, but when I think of the crew around my age: Daniel, Philip, Javier, Josh, Jessica Chastain — who is f------ Stradivarius — what a group! There's a group that could be in all the classic pictures right now. Like the classics of the seventies or the classics of the forties. I think of that group of actors and it's like, 'Gimme a camera, I got an idea!'"
On going through divorce: "There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved by someone. As I look back over my life in romance, I don't feel I've ever had that. I have been the only one that was unaware of the fraud in a few of these circumstances blindly. When you get divorced, all the truths that come out, you sit there and you go, 'What the f--- was I doing? What was I doing believing that this person was invested in this way?' Which is a fantastically strong humiliation in the best sense. It can make somebody very bitter and very hard and closed off, but I find it does the opposite to me."
On his new movie, Gangster Squad: “I just did this picture that I enjoyed doing. Gangster Squad. But I do think that in general the standard of aspiration is low. Very low. And mostly they’re just doing a bunch of monkey-f–k-rat movies, most actors and actresses. And I blame them just as much as I do the business. I know everybody wants to make some money, everybody’s got a modeling contract, everybody’s selling jewelry and perfume. I’m blinded by it. Bob Dylan said in an interview one time — somebody asked him, Are you really this reclusive? He says, No, I’m not reclusive, man. I’m exclusive. Exclusivity is like intimacy.”
Courtesy of Esquire
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