A Quote by Penelope Cruz
If I read a script and the subject stays with me - then that's when I want to go to work. Before, I was very addicted to being on set, and I was doing three or four movies a year for many years. Now, fortunately, I can go to work only when I am passionate about a project, and the rest of the time, I can live my life. I'm not interested in doing movies just as a marathon. When I go to work now, I have much more to give. But the other way, you get empty.
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I don't want to become more famous than what I am. I'm not interested in being in movies that are going to be shown all around the world and get a massive audience, so I'm interested in doing foreign movies as long as it stays an exceptional case and is exotic, but I don't want to go there [Hollywood].
What I do is work for three or four years and then I take a year off, and then I come back again and work for three or four years and then take another year off. It is not about just working and then writing for a year. That is not how it is structured. It is about doing very conscious goal-driven activities for four years and then taking a year off in complete surrender to discover facets of myself that I don't know exist and exploring interests with no commercial value associated with them at all.
I try to look at the whole thing and say 'yes' to the projects that I cannot stop thinking about. If I read a script and the subject stays with me - then that's when I want to go to work.
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.
Before I started doing '30 Rock', I did about 25 movies. I'd always been doing stand-up every night, and then I would do, like, two to four movies a year. So I really liked doing that, and I want to get back to that, but because of the time commitment to '30 Rock', there's not much time to do that stuff.
Part of why I wanted to produce was because I wanted the opportunity to work on projects I want to see. As a writer and as a director, I'm very specific about the kinds of things that I want to do. The opportunity that producing has given me is that by working with different writers and trying to get their movies made, or developing their script, or making their movies, every time I'm doing it, I'm learning and then bringing something to my own work. I like to think that there's a little bit of back and forth that goes on.
I came out to Los Angeles for a couple of meetings in the summer of 2005, and I ended up getting a movie called Firehouse Dog for Fox. And I thought, "Oh, man. I'm doing a movie. Maybe I'll work a lot more now. I'm an actor now." Then, for eight, nine months I didn't work after that. After that movie, I began to get some guest star roles, fairly consistently, but because I had been so presumptuous before in thinking that the other jobs would lead to something, I realized: "Just get up. Go to work. Go home. This is your job just like everyone else's job."
When I'm doing something I love, I can lose sleep. I can go and go and go and go. My work ethic is pretty intense. But when it comes to doing something that I don't love every day, I'm not very good at it. That's called work, and I don't like work that much.
Normally doing an album you go from track to track and go, 'Let's not work on this one today, let's go work on the other one,' and I think you tend to get more self-indulgent that way.
There's no reason my films can't work as hard as VR does to hook an audience and never let them go, so I think that that it turns the volume up a little bit on storytelling. The same way when I was doing commercials and then I went and shot 'Go,' and 'Go' has a level of pace that is unlike any of my other movies.
I know I am a human being. I can give myself to one year for a project. That is why I say I'm primitive in the way I work, especially compared to most artists. I came to New York in 1974, knowing that it is the art center of the world. But I didn't go to find people for my work. I do the work, and the people come to me, and I learn from them. That has always been my approach - to do the job first and then to respond to it after I finish and learn what people think about it. That's how I develop, and I'm more of an outsider in that way.
When I want to tackle a story or a subject, I always ask myself three questions: Is it important to talk about that? Will it interest other people than just me? Can I live with that for three or four years because that's how long it takes to do the project, to write the script, and to direct it, and then to do this.
We live in an age now where people go to the movies and, even the biggest movies are in the theaters six, eight weeks and then gone. And then for the rest of time now people are watching them on their phones, or computers, or TVs. And that's how the films gonna live.
Life is short. I'm years old. I've got years to go where I can be the best I can be. I want those years to be precious, not like before, cranking two or three movies a year. I've made a ton of movies in my life, but so what?
I only want to do good projects. I want to make good decisions. If it's just a dumb movie, then no, I'd rather stay in school. But if it's a movie worth telling and that I think I would really benefit from, then I would like to do it. And that's one of the reasons I still live in Colorado. I love being with my family and going to school, and then when I come out to L.A., that is the time to be in the movies. People ask me the questions, I do the promotion work, then I get to go back home and live my life.
So It's not like I go from being this disciplined person who has to get up and go to work to now I just lay around all day in my underwear eating Cheerios. I have this structure. I still have to do this and the difference is I'm doing this for me and my company.
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