A Quote by Jehane Noujaim
If you can laugh with somebody and relate to somebody, it becomes harder to dehumanize them. I think that most of what we are constantly bombarded with in terms of media leads you to a creation of 'the Other' and a dehumanization of 'the Other,' and it's very much an us-versus-them conversation.
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If you go back to the hood in America, I think most of them look at me like an icon. An icon is somebody they wanna be. Somebody who can relate to everything that they're going through at the time. So, I'm definitely an icon.
I wish the media and people that work in media would realize sometimes - and I know it doesn't pay your bills - but sometimes just sit back and think, like, 'Man, what if this was my child? And somebody was doing this to them? And they had to go through it? If somebody bashed them like this?'
The more that you dehumanize somebody, the easier it is to kill them... deport them... do whatever you can.
The left wants to transform America away from founding ideals, and this is it. And they know it. And they're doing everything they, and they've got the media helping them and so forth. I think one of the ways of exposing 'em is to ridicule 'em. I mean, laughter is the simplest way to humiliate somebody. Laugh at them, it shrinks them.
I always figure, you come to a party, you gotta know somebody. And somebody leads to another person and leads to somebody else, somebody else. That's one of things that I really enjoy doing.
We're so willing to dehumanize entire populations in order for us to conveniently go along with our lives. We know exactly one North Korean, for example. The rest of them, we don't know - but it makes it very easy to bomb North Korea if we pretend they're all one person. Literature makes it harder to dehumanize people in this way.
I think Carl Jung said, you know, I'm gonna paraphrase it badly, but, so much of what we fall in love with in other people is a potential in us that's ready to be realized. We're projecting onto them this amazing thing, but really it's us, and we're very close to integrating it and claiming it. If we do claim it, then we can just love somebody for who they are with all their flaws, but if we don't take that projection back, then we keep wanting them to have that. Then you just realize we're all screwed, that's how it works.
I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people's shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be - to not try to look at the world in a sense of "I'm not going to judge somebody. I'm going to try to understand who they are and what they're about."
China and the U.S. need each other very badly. Yes, we should argue about some things, but it's not an 'us versus them,' it's an 'us and them' type scenario.
I think my first general rule is that most of my experiences are not that interesting. It's usually other people's experiences. It's not that entirely conscious. Somebody tells me a story or, you know, repeats an anecdote that somebody else told them and I just feel like I have to write it down so I don't forget - that means for me, something made it fiction-worthy. Interesting things never happen to me, so maybe two or three times when they do, I have to use them, so I write them down.
When we talk about the foreign, the question becomes one of us versus them. But in the end, is one just the opposite side of the other?
Not ever having been an agent myself, my sense is that upper-level agents who have the most power, who can move people through the system more easily, are less willing to take on the volume of work to break somebody new. And then lower-level people, if they are willing to take on somebody new, they don't necessarily have as much sway, and it's harder for them to push somebody through.
Religiosity distinguishes America from most other Western societies. Americans are also overwhelmingly Christian, which distinguishes them from many non-Western peoples. Their religiosity leads Americans to see the world in terms of good and evil to a much greater extent than most other peoples.
Most actors have to sit by the phone and wait for somebody to call them up to audition and stuff. I don't think I can exist in Hollywood just on that. I think I need to be proactive and making sure that things I really want to do are being developed to the point where somebody wants to make them?
Maybe I just have a different line than other people in terms of where my personal emotional space becomes public and private. There's almost nothing I wouldn't tell somebody about my quote - unquote "personal life" if they asked in any conversation. There's nothing I've done or said that's that great. I don't see anything I've done to be that different than any other normal person.
We, as a band, love each other. We're brothers. So we fight. Somebody will call somebody else a douchebag. At the end of the day, we look at how far we've come and realize it would be foolish for us to ever take this for granted. We have a family. And not just a family at home, the family that has grown up with us and supported us through the years. We can't let them down.
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