A Quote by Dwayne Johnson
When I first came into acting, I had great opportunities to make a decent movie. I had a run there in 2005, '06, '07 - for a long time it was "Oh, he's the best thing in the movie that's not that good." I started questioning: Did I make the right choice? Should I have stayed in wrestling a bit longer? And then budgets became lower and lower and the pay kinda stayed the same and there wasn't a lot of growth.
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We stayed there 24 hours a day. We lived and ate and slept that movie. We were enthusiastic, not just because of the movie, but because we had such a great collaborative team. We had a really good time. It was very much a family.
I came in on this movie after there had been a director and I came in after Tom Courtenay had talked to Ron Harwood about making a movie. So, you know Tom and Albert Finney had been friends since the beginning of their career as they became stars around the same time - Tom always reminds me that Albert was first with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and then Tom with The Long Distance Runner.
When I make a movie, I just make the movie. I don't think about the success of it. If it becomes successful, that's an amazing treat. If it doesn't, you had a great time making it and you learned from it, and then you make a new thing.
When I was doing the first 'American Pie' movie, I was just happy to have a job. We had a good time, and it was a great group of people, but like any project that I've worked on in my career, you just put your best foot forward, and you're all working together to make the best movie possible.
I stayed in the East for about a year after I graduated. Then, I came out to Los Angeles and started knocking on doors and working my way up. This was the '70s. I had been told how tough it was for a woman trying to make it in Hollywood, but I sort of had blinders on. I just did things anyway.
People call me a movie star. If you're in the business, a movie star is someone who can make a film bankable. My name and $6 million will make a $6 million movie. I'm a working actor. Because I started late, I had a very short run as a leading man, and my films didn't make money in America.
I started out as an actor, but I forced myself to be a writer, even though I wasn't very good at it and had never written. I don't think I ever passed an English course in my life. My first eight to 10 scripts were pretty horrendous, but I stayed at it, stayed at it, and stayed at it, until I eventually found a voice and a subject like Rocky that people were interested in.
My first ten years in Hollywood were really tough. I'd be coaching friends who came to me for acting advice, and then they'd make it before I did. I'd still be helping them while they were on movie sets and I had four lines on a TV show.
There are two phases to a movie. First you shoot the movie, and then you make the movie. Generally, post-production is longer than filming.
The first role I ever played I had the lead and it's pretty much stayed that way, though people take great relish in calling me a character actor, which I am. There are a lot of short parts I could play, but I only do them when they are like this ("A Few Good Men"), central to the idea of the movie.
My grandfather and his wife came to America at the end of the 19th century from Hungary. Everyone started out on the Lower East Side. They became embourgeoise and would move to the Upper West Side. Then, if they'd make money, they'd move to Park Avenue. Their kids would become artists and move down to the Lower East Side and the Village.
Leaving my first agent was both my best business decision and my worst business decision. It depends on how I want to look at my career because of opportunities that may have come had I stayed with him and because of the opportunities that did come because I had to fight harder for roles.
You try to make them comfortable so they can do what they're best at, and make them shine. You always want to make an actor shine. I'm of the mind that there's no one - you, your mother, anyone, that if in the right place at the right time in the right context, couldn't shine in a movie. And so if it means, "Oh, I have to make them uncomfortable," then whatever it takes to get what I need up onscreen. It's all in the service of the story.
I had my group of friends, and they stayed my group of friends, they were good about that. We all started to succeed at the same time, so that sort of took the curse off it. I didn't have a bunch of people scowling at me and being potentially jealous. I just had good friends who I was able to help, and they helped me. Yet it eventually came to feel debilitating.
What we do is service a story first, and then you figure out how to pay for it later. If the narrative isn't your primary focus, then the movie is going to become diluted, and you don't have a movie that is as good as it could be, so it probably won't make as much money.
'Little Princess' was the first big movie that I did in America with big stages where we had kind of a different schedule to work. We had a great production designer, Bo Welch, and we had time to think about the movie in pre-production.
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