A Quote by Al Pacino

The reasons you have for doing a movie will vary with the way your life is going. There was a time when a made a some movies because I felt I needed to work. And I didn't think about the material as much. But sometimes I've thought about the material a lot and thought I was doing the right thing, and it didn't work out.
You never know how things work and what exactly is going to grab an audience. Sometimes even the best material and the best collection of people interpreting that material just for some reason doesn't fly with people. There are a lot of TV shows or movies that maybe aren't as good as others that do work when it comes to finding an audience. It's a mystery, that whole thing. If somebody figured it out, this would be quite a great industry.
I believe that the greatest music is storytelling anyway, in a heightened medium. So I write a lot of music, and I play a lot with my guitar, I still sing a lot, but now I'm more personal about it than public, in a way. I think there will be a time where I'd like to bring the singing back into some of my performances. It all depends if the material's right, if the story's right, if it's my kind of taste in music, as well. It means so much to me. We all know how affective music can be, I just want to make sure when I do it, I'm doing it because I actually feel it and I care about it.
The material I did was lasting material. A lot of people thought I wasn't doing anything, but I was in the studio. The biggest factor is the material you choose. You hunt, you cut.
Simply, if you're working with good material, then it's right there, and you don't have to try so hard as an actor; you don't have to do so much. Just let the material sit inside you and let it come out. Just say the words. That was the main thing that I learned from doing Aaron Sorkin's work - say the words, and everything else will happen.
I want to work with great directors. I want to work on good material with good actors. I've probably done 20 movies at this point and a lot of independents. It's been an incredible ride and I love it and I'm just going to keep going and doing what I'm doing.
The scheduling thing is really weird with TV shows. Certain projects haven't been able to work out because of the schedule, so some of it is out of your control. You don't have very many opportunities. There isn't much time, so you want to make sure you're going to be doing something that you really feel good about or that you're going to have a good creative experience doing. You're taking up vacation time from your job, so you want it to be meaningful.
What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
When I'm doing a movie, I'm not doing anything else. It's all about the movie. I don't have a wife. I don't have a kid. Nothing can get in my way... I've made a choice, so far, to go on this road alone. Because this is my time. This is my time to make movies.
Sometime really good writing does you a disservice as an actor. Because you can get lazy. It's doing a lot of the work for you. I guess that's good. But at the same time with material that's not so good, you have to be more inventive, because no thought has been applied to it.
The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about. You only had to turn me loose on the set and I`d have material in two minutes, because I`d been doing it all my life.
It's weird, sometimes I still see myself as just starting out. I tend to forget how much I've been doing, but in the beginning it is about the hustle, being out there and doing the work. Nothing is going to come to you, you have to get out there and do the work, and I've been doing that. But sometimes it's good to take a break and let these things air out. Reflect and take it in.
I never thought I was going to make a movie about men. I've always thought we don't have enough movies about women, and if I spent my whole life making movies only about women, there still wouldn't be enough movies about women, so that's a wonderful thing to dedicate my career to.
I've made movies that I thought were good. I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, I wish more people saw that - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.
Something like going to get the newspaper can increase your writing efficiency by taking you away from the material. When I'm doing other things, writing stuff will be swirling around in my head, and sometimes I'll see a new way into the material.
I don't believe in work-life balance. I think it's more about work-life integration because, increasingly, so much time of ours is spent doing work, so I've always wanted to dedicate my work life to having a social impact.
It is a pity to make a mystery out of what should most easily be understood. There is nothing occult about the thought that all things maybe made well or made ill. A work of art is a well-made thing - that is all. It may be a well-made statue of a well-made chair or a well-made book. Art is not a special sauce applied to ordinary cooking; it is the cooking itself that is good. Most simply and generally, Art may be thought of as "The Well Doing of What Needs Doing."
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