I recently saw the movie about Ray Charles, and there's a scene where he falls down and the mother doesn't help him. She says, I don't want anyone to treat you like a cripple. I've fallen down before, and Molly will say, get up and just go.
A man is at the bar, drunk. I pick him up off the floor, and offer to take him home. On the way to my car, he falls down three times. When I get to his house, I help him out of the car, and on the way to the front door, he falls down four more times. I ring the bell and say, Here's your husband! The man's wife says, Where's his wheelchair?
I don't like that word 'discovery.' ... Sinatra was the first one to call Ray Charles a genius, he spoke of 'the genius of Ray Charles.' And after that everybody called him a genius. They didn't call him a genius before that though. He was a genius but they didn't call him that. ... If a white man hadn't told them, they wouldn't've seen it. ... Like, you know, they say Columbus discovered America, he didn't discover America.
Your woman tells me you will hunt me down and eat my marrow while I live." "Did she?" Charles looked at her, and she saw the approval in his face. She doubted anyone else would have read anything at all. His voice was a caress, just for her. "Would you like that, love?
Kids don't say, "Wait." They say, "Wait up, hey wait up!" Because when you're little, your life is up. The future is up. Everything you want is up. "Hold up. Shut up! Mum, I'll clean up. Let me stay up!" Parents, of course, are just the opposite. Everything is down. "Just calm down. Slow down. Come down here! Sit down. Put... that... down."
She really does like him, she likes lying next to him, she wants to be around him; when you get down to it, can you say that about many people?
I try to do everything to say, 'OK, will my mother like this? Will she be pleased? Will she be proud of that? How do I know she's happy and she's smiling down at me from heaven?' And that's what I try to go by and walk by.
He very nearly stole a scene in my movie, and I didn't call him on it because I was just like, Hey, I saw some stuff on SuperDeluxe and how many different films do you have on there? And he goes, This one, this one, Comedy by Numbers and this one and one called 'Bob Pitches a Movie.' And I'm like, Oh! And then I was thinking he would say, which is very similar to the one to the one I did in your movie, but he never did. I just let it go. I don't care.
Richard Branson is probably the most visible of the private commercial space guys, and what is venture, Virgin Galactic is about is sub orbital flight. That is, you'll see a spacecraft that looks more or less like an airplane and it will fly into space, but only spend about 15 minutes. It'll go up in a parabolic arc and then fall back down, and so the customers on that flight will only get about five minutes of weightlessness. They'll get to glimpse the horizon of the Earth, take a look at it before just before they start coming back down into the atmosphere.
Don’t always want to go up. Go down, like water, because eventually it’ll go up again. Just like rain, it falls from the sky, flows as a river, then merges with the sea, the goes up again as a cloud.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
She saw him after seventh hour in a place she'd never seen him before, carrying a microscope down the hall on the third floor. It was at least twice as nice as seeing him somewhere she expected him to be.
My mother says to me, when I'm making a new movie, she says, "Oh, is Steve Buscemi in it?" I'd say, "Yeah." And she, "Oh, then it's going to be a good one." I swear to God, she says that every time. And when I say Steve's not in it, she says, "Oh."
As Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor. My sister [Maggie Gyllenhaal] came up to me recently after she saw this movie, Southpaw, the movie I did, and she thought there was this exploration of that type of presentation, and a bit of representation as well, if I could be totally honest, where she was deeply moved.
We meet before the movie and she gives you charts with sounds on them and makes a tape of examples. While they are setting up the scene, I go with her to the trailer and we go through the scene and correct the speech.
When some people get parts, they feel they can now relax, but for me it was always the opposite. Sometimes before I do a movie or before I act out a scene, I may not sleep well the night before. If I don't know what the scene is about, I might get all worked up.
I think Ray Charles did as much as anybody when he did his country music album. Ray Charles broke down borders and showed the similarities between country music and R&B.