Through film, I realized that was a safe place for me to play. It was a safe place for me to express myself and explore these things that I was afraid to explore in my real life.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I love to be scared in the safety of a movie theater. It is like a thrill ride; like a roller-coaster ride.
I studied for three years in the theater, and it was a very, very scary experience to direct live, being so vulnerable without the possibility to control things, to be so exposed.
It was actually a relief for me to play an actor who was scared, who didn't know where everything was, who didn't know what buttons to push, and for me to be able to play all that.
We all have an escape. Mine was theater.
When I felt like an outsider, movies made me feel inside my own skill set.
I was just blown away by everything my dad was doing, every play. It was amazing to be able to go as a young person to the theater and see these visuals and how creative it could be. More than anything it was realizing you could do that as a life path.
Everybody was trying to put me in action movies and heroic roles, and I wanted to find more complex things. They just didn't suit my taste, so I thought, 'OK, I have to be brave enough to say no.' And for a while, that hurt me immeasurably in the Hollywood world.
When I was little, I put on plays for my family at Sunday dinner, and I would direct them and have all my cousins, my brother, and my best friends in it. I was a very imaginative and theatrical child and wasn't afraid of being in front of a camera. It was like make-believe to me.
When I was in theater I was forever trying to inhabit a space which puts yourself under the microscope as an actor and your personality and your take on life, but actually through another portal of a character.
I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn't just looking back at you.