I remember thinking, 'I can't act.' Pretending to be someone else is a terrifying thought. The thing was that, along with other people, I could create a whole world. I felt absolutely right directing.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
With acting, I always felt like I didn't have control of it. It was all about other people giving me a job.
What drew me to acting in the first place was disguise.
Acting was something that just came along. But I made good money, so it wasn't something I was just going to put aside and pretend it didn't exist.
Initially I probably didn't even call it acting, but dressing up or something. As a kid I think you fully imagine the world in which you want to inhabit, so you put some clothes on and just kind of freely imagine this world, and it's a total imaginary world.
I always felt like acting was something I could just do if I wanted, which was wrong.
For lack of any clearer idea, I just started acting one day. It had been in the back of my head for a while, but I think in some ways I was afraid to do it, and finally I just stepped up.
I wanted to direct more than I wanted to act. And I found I couldn't do everything.
I was going to school thinking I was going to do something entirely different, thought acting was just a hobby at that point, met Stanley Kubrick and was like, 'Whoa, this can be an art form, and you can really move people the way you do simply by acting.'
I always felt like I needed to act. Not that I wanted to act, but I needed to. And I still feel that same way. There's an expression that I get to have in acting that I can't consciously express in my life. It has always defined me and it always will.
I just happened to step into acting. And now I can't imagine myself doing anything else.