A Quote by Mike Colter
When you take the job, you never think about how many days you're going to take bullets. Sometimes you go on set and you're thinking, "Ah, a day when I don't have to get shot. This is going to be a nice day."
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For me, I never take a job thinking it's going to grab ratings or that it's even going to be a success. I don't. I just take the job because I love the character. Or I love the script. Maybe I love the director. But whatever I do, I never think about how it will do. That is not in my hands.
When you're doing a live-action movie, you have your day set up and you're going to do this shot and this shot, and eventually the sun is going to go down. It's a sequential race to whatever is going to end the day.
What we really have to do is take a day and sit down and think. The world is not going to end or fall apart. Jobs won't be lost. Kids will not run crazy in one day. Lovers won't stop speaking to you. Husbands and wives are not going to disappear. Just take that one day and think. Don't read. Don't write. No television, no radio, no distractions. Sit down and think. . . . Go sit in a church, or in the park, or take a long walk and think. Call it a healing day.
I try to set an intent every morning and take time to think about whatever I hope to achieve that day. I've learned that there's never going to be enough time to do anything. It's never going to be a perfect day, and I'm at a point in my life where my children are more important than work. Work is still important to me though, and I love what I do.
I think everyone is always asking themselves, How is my work meaningful, how is my life meaningful? As I get older, I feel like who I am as a person and a citizen is more important than who I am in my work. But I do think it reframed slightly for me, how much I have to care about a project in order to want to do it. Sometimes, obviously, you have a take a job for money. But I think I'm quicker now when I get a script that's, say, borderline misogynist, I'm not going to go in for it. I'm thinking more about what I'm putting into the world.
Almost every time I go to the ocean, I think about throwing my phone right into it. Sometimes, you pull that thing out of your pocket, you look at it, and you're like, 'What was I just going to do with this? Was I going to take a note? Was I going to check my email? Was I going to take a picture?'
I'm not going to go out there and set the world on fire and win my first race. People have to understand that. It's going to take time. It's going to take a lot of learning. I think eventually we'll obviously get better with time.
If the idea is you're working at a job solely to pay the bills because you have ambitions to do something else, if you're not actively trying to do that other thing, you've gotta make sure you're doing that. Sometimes you've gotta take away your own safety net. But if you feel miserable in a day job, in any job, get out of that. Look for something else. Stay in that job until you have the other thing set up, and then go to that other thing. But sometimes you've just got to jump out with a parachute and trust that you're going to land someplace safe.
Sometimes what happens I think is that actors finish a movie and they go, oh my god, I'm never going to work again, even big huge actors, and so they'll take something thinking that something else will never come along. But for me, I freak out - because I'm a bit of a workaholic - the second I finish a movie going oh my god, what am I going to do, but I can start writing the next day so it doesn't force me to make a bad choice acting-wise.
You never think about what life's going to be like five years down the road or 10 - you just go though the day and try to make good decisions. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. You just hope this day will be a good day.
As a songwriter, you're never off - for me, anyway. There's a certain mentality of people that decide, "Oh, we're going to try to write songs from this time of the day to this time of the day." Almost treat it like a real job. I can't do that. I've never been able to write songs like that. You never know when something creative is going to hit you, or emotion or whatever. You can take it, and turn it into something that makes somebody feel something. I love that about my job.
When you go to a film set, of course you're going to do your job, and you're excited about being there, but you somehow feel fatigued that you are just doing this day in and day out.
We're going to face problems on a day to day basis and there's probably going to be that one obstacle that you think oh I'm not going to be able to get through it but just remember if you set your mind to achieve a goal, then you can do it.
Sometimes I think you do the things you think are best at the time for what you need to take care of, and then just one thing leads to another thing. And one day you're there going, 'How did I get here? It wasn't my ultimate plan, but I'm here.'
Sometimes it helps to take a couple days off, as weird as that sounds. Every once in a while, I could just shoot so many shots. You can get so, like, intense with it all. It's like in life, right? We're all created for a sabbath day or for a day of rest. You sometimes need that in shooting, too.
I worry from the moment I take a job. I worry about how I'm going to do it, if I can do it... Then I walk on set and the director says, 'Roll', and all of a sudden, all of it disappears and it's all happening, and I relax, and I'm doing what I do, and I'm not even thinking about it.
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