A Quote by Gary Oldman

I had what AA calls 'a convincer' - which made me realize that I couldn't do it any more. I went out drinking for about 70 hours here in London. At the end I knew I was done.
I stopped drinking a few years ago, and drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble. You can get away with that your 20s, but not in your 60s, and I'll be 70 next year. Life is a small space now, much more intimate. I'm not out there in the world anymore, but I'm watching.
But to me, Broadway has always had more a 'village' feeling than London's West End. The theaters here are clustered together, the staff and many people in the business know each other - it's like a little village all to itself, whereas in London everything is more spread out.
People close to me wouldn't have thought that I had a drinking problem because it wasn't evident although towards the very end of my drinking perhaps it became a little bit more of an issue.
I had done quite a bit of stage when I was younger, local stuff, musicals. Then I started professionally, I suppose, when I was 11, in London, in the West End, which was already huge for me.
Dancing is still, for me, one of those things that no matter when I do it and it sounds corny and cliche, but time stands still. I could literally dance for hours and hours on end and not realize that I've been dancing for hours and hours on end. In the right setting, I could literally dance all day and have a blast. It seems like one moment to me. There's nothing else going on, and it's the ultimate release.
Once I stopped drinking and I'd be going out on dates, or hanging out with guys, I'd realize, "Oh, maybe I don't like them that much!" I think the drinking was to make these guys more tolerable.
I had more trouble than I had a sense of utility or satisfaction. But it served to occupy me and to keep me occupied in a field that I love - which was cinema - while I was waiting to realize the film that I wanted to do, which was Once Upon a Time in America, which took ten years of thinking and working to realize.
Right away, I knew I didn't want to have that look of other guys with long hair and bell-bottom pants, because everybody else had that look. I kind of adopted my boarding-school look, which made me stand out. Then the next thing you know, the first song on my first record is a song called "School Days." It's about going to the boarding school I went to. So then I just started to write about myself. The very first song I ever wrote was about a guy I met in a boatyard that we were working in. So I've always had this thing about sticking to more or less what I knew.
I keep telling people: Don't make me the poster boy for AA because I don't know a lot about sobriety, but I do know a lot about drinking.
The first time I ever thought about doing a film seriously, I was in London. I was about 17 years old. I was just standing in the street, a bit dazzled by an Antonioni bus wipe, which by the way are inherent in London, and I imagined a film set in London starting out with the riff from The Yardbird's "Heart Full of Soul", and now, how ever many years later, I've done it.
My skills weren't that I knew how to design a floppy disk, I knew how to design a printer interface, I knew how to design a modem interface; it was that, when the time came and I had to get one done, I would design my own, fresh, without knowing how other people do it. That was another thing that made me very good. All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.
I knew I really made it when my dad saw me in London and after the performance he had no notes to me and just said 'You are doing your own thing and I am proud of you.'
I think the first experience scared the hell out of me. Within months of my initial marriage [on Angela Bowie], I realized I had done a really naive and rather stupid thing. . . . I don't think either of us had any real resolve about being together. The result was it made me wary of relationships.
It was strange and amusing...and, honestly, a bit embarrassing...to realize how much being near Bella had softened me. It seemed like no one was afraid of me any more. If Emmett found out about this, he would be laughing for the next century.
I might have made more money if I had outsourced to India, and I knew I'd find it easier to hire senior managers in London. But I wanted to be in Stoke. What could be more satisfying than creating work for 3,000 people in my home town?
he first make-up crew had three test runs, so by the time we were shooting, they got it down to three hours. They switched make-up crews for Eclipse and they never had any test runs, and they had to figure out what the other team had done, so the first day, I was in the chair for eight hours. But, they adjusted the scar from New Moon to Eclipse. The first time, there was more pullage on my face, so I had a hard time eating. It didn't hurt, but it was uncomfortable.
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