I think the two main tools actors have are the imagination of what other people have gone through, to connect with and through research, and there's one's own experience.
Through the years, through my own conversations, through my own weird obsessions, I think I have developed some very deep politics of political knowledge - and I think I have huge blind spots, too - which I have tried to build not necessarily through traditional interviews so much as it is conversations and a lot of research and reading.
I get through difficult situations by looking at how other people have gone through them. I say to myself, 'If they can go through it, then I can.' Or, If they can go through worse, I can go through whatever I'm going through.
The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.
You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
A lot of people think teenagers haven't gone through anything in their lives - they're not even 20 years old yet. But a twenty-something can go through the same type of experience or heartbreak that a 50-year-old can go through, so why does age matter?
The thing about losing any loved one, I think, particularly in a long disease, is that you know that other people have gone through it and are going through it, but I think for every person it feels unique.
Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
Whether it's films or painting or music or writing a book, the greatest experience is being able to express yourself and what you've gone through, trying to figure out a way to make it into something that's artistic that people can connect with.
That authentic experience that happens both in the artist and in the audience you can classify as a mystical experience. You can classify it as aesthetic shock, or even a psychedelic experience. Some people seek to recreate that experience through drugs. But the other way that you can do it is through art, and through spectacle. We have those experiences when we go to rock shows, or when we listen to a piece of classical music, or read a particular poem, or see a painting.
In the Craft, we do not believe in the Goddess - we connect with her; through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the earth, through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves. She is here. She is within us all.
I have ventured out and written about real-life experiences that I haven't gone through myself, but I've known people to go through them. In the past, I've always written about my experiences and people related to that, but there's a lot of other things that I've never written about that people have gone through.
The fact that I'd gone through my own transition as governor of Indiana and had been informed by that experience, I think was an asset.
Usually I approach to acting completely blindfolded. I read the script, I connect to the character, and then I try not to think about it too much until I'm there and I'm in wardrobe and I'm with the other actors and we're going through the scene once.
We've gone thorough religious wars and civil wars. America has gone through slavery, we've all gone through two world wars, segregation. Ultimately it's been a bloody, trying, wasteful, but eventually positive struggle.
I think everybody, especially every woman that you speak to, has gone through periods of their life where they feel uncertain or insecure. But I've been fortunate in my own life never to have gone through extended periods of crippling insecurity.
I have done research about people who think they're doing movements and people - like Madonna and professional dancers - who are actually 'performing' movements. The people who can connect and perform during their workout get results way above and beyond the people who are just going through the motions.