A Quote by Steve McQueen

I've got a feeling I'm leaving stardom behind, you know. I'm gradually becoming more of a filmmaker, acquiring a different kind of dignity from that which you achieve in acting. After all, I'm no matinee idol, and I'm getting older. I don't think I can be doing my kind of thing in the seventies; I want to be on more of the creative side of business.
I used to think that when I got older, the world would make so much more sense. But you know what? The older I get, the more confusing it is to me. The more complicated it is. Harder. You’d think we’d be getting better at it. But there’s just more and more chaos. The pieces—they’re everywhere. And nobody knows what to do about it. I find myself grasping, Nick. You know that feeling? That feeling when you just want the right thing to fall into the right place, not only because it’s right, but because it will mean that such a thing is still possible? I want to believe in that.
What's the level of compromise for making that kind of money? How far do I have to sell my soul? What's the price of that? And I don't know if I want to make those kind of compromises any more. I think I'm a different person. I think I've matured to a great extent. I think that I want different things now. That it's not about the celebrity status that you receive because you're doing the next hot movie. It's about doing good work.
As I get older, I'm more willing to take on more, I guess. I feel more comfortable kind of being different characters and kind of stretching it a little more. Like with The Visitation. At least for me, being an actor, I have to draw from human experiences, so it was kind of a stretch playing that role. Kind of supernatural... kind of like what I did in The Crow actually.
In getting older, I find myself becoming progressively more ineffectual in a lot of different ways, and part of that is down to no longer having the youthful feeling that what you're doing has any true impact.
I remember when I was maybe 27 years old and kind of at the height of my movie stardom - it was around the time of the Oscar and this and that. I think I was very much believing my own hype, which how could you not? I was sitting with my dad, feeling great about my life and everything that was happening, and he was like, "You know, you're getting a little weird...You're kind of an asshole." And I was like, "What the hell?" I was totally devastated. But it turned out to be basically the best thing that ever happened to me.
Writing is the great skill, the creative skill. The acting is more an interpretative skill. And the thrill for me is the moment when I think of something. And then the challenge is how to get that funny idea to work in terms of the structure and that kind of thing, which is - and that's what I really love doing.
I've been so fortunate throughout my career, when I was doing theater, more theater than anything else, and when I was doing films that I got a chance just to do a broad range of things. In fact, a lot of my choices that I made were about that very thing. Every project that I had an opportunity to do or chose to do, I wanted it to be different from the last thing I did, and I think that's why I have a good, you know, I had kind of a diverse kind of résumé. I'm really - it's what I set out to do as an actor originally.
I think that, in the beginning, you think, 'I want to be the biggest movie star in the world.' And then, with the more movies you make, you are like, 'I don't know if I want to be that anymore. I think what I am looking for is something different.' I like acting, but a lot of times, stardom comes with a lot of strings attached.
I went to film school at Columbia and did that for a couple years and really thought I was going to be a filmmaker, and then I kind of drifted over to the acting side after that. I'd been an actor in high school, and when I got to college, it was all about film.
You know, it's kind of a shame in a way but the more seasoned directors a lot of times have more difficult getting a job than first time guys. New kid on the block kind of thing.
I've got my years on tour now kind of under my belt, and I'm getting the experience and playing more and more big matches, which I think helps.
I went to film school at Columbia and did that for a couple years, and really thought I was going to be a filmmaker, and then I kind of drifted over to the acting side after that.
As I got older, I went to school. I started doing plays, I learned about the craft of acting, and I started to love acting for different reasons. I think I started to love acting because it brought me closer to people and made me more compassionate.
I've been singing about love a long time now, because my kind of love carries a different flavor. My lyrics are not so outrageous as some. You have to think about a lot of different things. You get more mature with what you do - more experience, more capable, you know, the older you get.
The people on the business side in the music business are kind of different from the theatre business. I think it's partly because there are different pressures on the industries.
When you're coming up with different ways of getting old memories to transform - you're scratching, you're doing all this kind of sampling - what ends up happening is that you're becoming a kind of writer with sound.
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