I've done a lot of movies based on real people, real situations, non-fiction books, magazine articles, life rights.
The truth is that we have to, as American citizens, stop thinking that this life that we're living, the things that we're dealing with, is some reality TV show. This is real life, real children, real situations.
I'm all about nonfiction. I rarely read fiction. I like to read about things that really happened, facts, real life situations. That's what inspires me.
It is easy to make stuff up - and easy to dig up information and repeat it or report it to others. But to find a real life story with real people in real life situations is quite difficult and time-consuming. Yet, the rewards are worth the effort.
When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.
Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.
War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.
All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real.
I think "honest" sometimes gets used to describe a real depiction of real life. I don't think that's necessarily what we're doing. We created these fake characters and we're just trying to figure out what they would do in situations they enter into.
The real revelation of a player's character is not in his social life but in how he plays. In my social life I can hide my real personality.
One thing that I really love about making records is that you can flow through fiction and non-fiction but, ultimately, everything's a commentary on real life in some way.
In the movies, they make you look good and tough, but in real life, it's completely the opposite. I do these ueber roles, I think, because in real life I'm quite shy and reserved. In real life, I'm a dork.
Because I came into acting late, my references come from real life. That's my biggest inspiration. It's probably the reason I moved back to New York. I'm just a lot more inspired by real life than I am by depictions of real life.
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.
How do you document real life, when real life's getting more like fiction each day.