A Quote by Brian Grazer

The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people's perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world - to be accepted.
There were no examples of girls like myself becoming successful actresses. To be an actress in England was a serious, upper-middle class girl's profession. I just thought I would never be accepted unless I pretended to become somebody I wasn't.
I would go to college and people would know me from the rave they went to at the weekend. So I would get a bit of respect. But I would always go to class and do my work. My mother made sure of that.
I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. And I was. I was growing up middle-class in a time when growing up middle-class in America meant there would be jobs for my parents, good schools for me to prepare myself for a career, and, if I worked hard and played by the rules, a chance for me to do anything I wanted.
I'm someone who thinks that the world would be a better place if there was a big middle class. I mean, middle class is peace. In a perfect world, everybody would have enough to eat and we'd be living in security. It's obvious. I'm very happy to pay my taxes and all that. I would say I'm more of a Social Democrat.
For me it's really tough because you have to go to that place where you really, really don't want to go to or revisit. After the first movie, when I was crying at the altar, whenever I would think about it, I would get chills for months after the first "Best Man" because I had to go to that place. And then, here we are with this one, and we are going to that place again. It's just extremely emotional to just have to keep revisiting it, but it can also be therapeutic.
I think that, often, actors represent what they're not. You get people who define the aristocracy who are not aristocratic - they're lower-middle class or working class. An awful lot of your so-called angry young actors have grown up in extreme bourgeois comfort. It really is surprisingly common.
I had to get used to seeing Samantha Bee around. I had to get used to seeing Jon, like, getting a bagel, and to John Oliver, and all these people whom I had seen on TV. Colbert would sometimes drop by. I had to get used to being a part of this multiple-Emmy-winning machine and being this 22-year-old black girl who was really green.
I love Irvine. That's my 'hood. I went to USC and used to come home every weekend. It's in my comfort zone.
I've just always been terrified of having to speak in front of people. When I used to go in school and then I had to do a report in front of the class and speak, I would freeze up, sometimes I would even like tear up almost and start crying and stuff... couldn't deal.
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
Since I still think of myself as a middle class guy, people get to see that side of me in films like 'Middle Class Abbayi.'
I was chubby in high school. I used to go to my information technology class, and I would type really fast to get the lesson done quick because the teacher had a little acoustic guitar, and there was a girl I had a crush on in the class. I would take the guitar and pretend to be some great singer-songwriter, serenade her with joke songs.
I feel like when I was 13 and I had to go to bar mitzvahs every weekend. This is the same feeling. You have to put on a suit every weekend to go meet with a bunch of Jews.
You can point to a lot of women showrunners that have had long and successful careers. In terms of the kinds of movies that women can get made, as long as the business operates under this model of the first-weekend [box office] focus, with huge movies aimed at super-young audiences, it will be really tough for women to do something that really changes the landscape. Because honestly, until they figure out how to get grown women into the theaters on the first weekend, it won't change.
I think 'The Wood' was probably more concerned with the parts of Inglewood that aren't usually seen on film - the areas that were middle-class, or upper-middle-class - and that idea that these worlds do exist, and should be accepted as part of Inglewood itself.
I never grew up seeing women that looked like me in magazines or on TV and didn't feel like I had a place in the world of fashion. I am honoured to be part of that change.
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