A Quote by Michael Gracey

In 'The Greatest Showman,' I'm back doing VFX myself, allowing me to craft exactly how something looks, one frame at a time. — © Michael Gracey
In 'The Greatest Showman,' I'm back doing VFX myself, allowing me to craft exactly how something looks, one frame at a time.
My background is in VFX, and I know from experience that the best VFX are when you have something real in the frame that you can either extend or work off of. It was really important to get as much as possible in camera, for real.
My entire life, I've always known that I wanted to be a performer, but I didn't know exactly how, where or when. I never learned or studied the craft, formally. I grew up doing martial arts and playing piano. But, something inside of me always said that I was going to do this, as far back as I can remember.
For me, it really is about the self-acceptance... the more time that I spend really accepting and allowing myself to be exactly where I am, the faster it is I move towards what I wanna be doing.
I had the best teacher in the business. Kevin Costner was my teacher. I was acting opposite him and he was directing me. The way he directed me, for which I am eternally grateful, is he would watch the scene back on the monitor, which is sort of considered unfashionable - you're not meant to watch yourself. But he was like, "Come around. Watch this. See there, you're doing a great reaction, but you're doing it out of frame." That was exactly what I needed. I learned how to act on film from him.
My greatest contribution to hip-hop was allowing the United States of America to know and understand exactly how far they reach, and how influential they are to children in completely different countries because I am the import.
Any talk of 'craft' makes me laugh. My music looks outward; it does not gaze upon itself in admiration. Artisanal is for cheesemakers. I don't know anything about music theory. Every time I approach my guitar, it's like the first time. There's no craft in that.
Knowing about my body, different aspects of my body, it's been a big thing. It's really helped me as far as injury and whatnot, so I know exactly if something feels funny, I know what I'm capable of doing to help myself get back stronger and get back healthy.
Whenever I have a birthday, I think back over the past year, how I've spent my time, what I've accomplished, what regrets I have, how I've tried to make the world a better place, and what exactly I've been doing with my life over the past 365 days, and I think to myself: 'Man, I wish I'd gotten laid more'.
You can talk yourself out of doing something if you start to think about, "How would this person see it, or that person see it?" So sometimes it's allowing myself to be in it and not talking myself out of it.
I try to be aware of what I'm concerned about, aware of how I feel about myself in the world, aware of how I feel about the issues of the day, but I guess I don't want to write essays in my head about my craft and maybe it's because I teach and talk about craft of other writers as a reader. I feel the moment I start doing that is when it's going to kill me.
The craft, the writing of a song, is about creating a story, a life story, a world within three minutes, but that's the frame, if you like, the picture frame. That fascinates me.
Ever since I was young I understood the whole meaning of life isn't how much money you accumulate, how much fame you experience, it's how many lives you touch, how many faces you bring smiles to. I see myself back in Hawaii doing something in the community to improve the lives of young children. Everything I've done is to prepare myself to give back.
So I think the biggest thing that I've learnt in my career is not allowing external factors to determine my self-worth - external factors being what coaches think of me, the amount of playing time I get - not allowing those things that actually are out of my control affect how I feel about myself.
It just seemed to me to be a great story, set back in its time but something that seemed to have relevance for our time. Now that the film is coming out, it looks like we're back in another time where repression of expression is all the rage.
You don't really see tight ends out here doing dances in the end zone. But if you see me at night out on the town, I'm having a good time - I'm always dancing. It started in the backyard, not to necessarily showboat - but to be a showman. It's part of how we grew up, how we played the game, and now that I'm in the NFL, why not break it out?
Procrastinating is number three on my Stupid List. You still end up exactly where you didn't want to be, doing exactly what you didn't want to do, withe the only difference being that you lost all that time in between, during which you could have been doing something fun. Even worse, you probably stayed in a stressed-out, crappy mood the whole time you were avoiding it. If you know something is inevitable, do it and get it over with. Move on. Life is short.
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