A Quote by Zal Batmanglij

I remember being a kid, I was a little kid when my dad took me to 'Munchausen.' I guess he took my whole family, but I kind of didn't want to go for some reason. Then we got there, and I was so mesmerized by the movie, and I was really taken by the young Sarah Polley. I didn't realize until many, many years later that it was Sarah Polley.
Sarah Polley's 'Stories We Tell,' James Ponsoldt's 'The Spectacular Now,' Destin Daniel Cretton's 'Short Term 12' - these are really important movies.
I never really took into account the number of homeless families. As a kid, we used to feed the hungry at my church every other Saturday, and one day this kid from my school was there. Somewhere between that moment of realization and appreciation for what my Dad sacrificed for us to have, and me becoming "Anthony Mackie" I lost it. This movie [Shelter] really made me realize that, and it was very humbling and very sickening to see that within myself.
Sarah Jane Smith was everybody's hero when I was younger, and as brave and funny and brilliant as people only ever are in stories. But many years later, when I met the real Sarah Jane - Lis Sladen herself - she was exactly as any child ever have wanted her to be. Kind and gentle and clever; and a ferociously talented actress, of course, but in that perfectly English unassuming way.
Half of my mum's family is Welsh. I remember when I was a kid she used to read to me, and witches and wizards in books always had a Welsh accent, so I guess I took it from that really.
When I was 4, my parents took me to see a musical, and I was like, 'I want to do that!' I started doing all sorts of musical camps and a lot of professional theater. I took dance classes for 10 years, too - I was never the most amazing kid in the other classes, but tap stuck with me for some reason.
I'm in, like, dating Babylon. Like, I go on dates with men and, literally, like Sarah Palin will come up in like the first 20 minutes, and that doesn't put me in the mood. Like, talking about Sarah Palin. And they just want to know gossip, and I'm just kind of taking a little hiatus from dating right now, because I just don't want to talk about Sarah Palin.
My dad and I used to do movie marathons when I was a kid at the Chinese Theatre, and I just remember thinking, 'One day I want to have a movie here' And then later on, when 'Save The Last Dance' premiered there, that was definitely a full circle moment.
First time I ever took acid and got really high, as I was walking around I thought "Gee. The world looked like this when I was a little kid." I remember seeing the sparkling reality and three-dimensionality of things. Sort of like a renewal, every time you do it is a renewal, it is a renewal. It keeps your head young. It lets you keep that being able to accept the new thing just as easily as a kid would. Most people get all this stuff in their head like an old library, no room for the new volume to go on the shelves.
My parents took me to a movie, and I remember wanting to sit apart from them for some reason. I wanted to be a big boy or whatever. I remember looking up on that screen. It was a movie about medieval knights. All I remember is saying, 'I want to do that. I want to make movies.'
All I'd ever heard my entire life in my family was, "Nobody wanted you, and we took you in." When you get that into your head at a tender age, you really feel like you are an unlovable human being, and then you behave like one. That's exactly what I had done. It took me many years to deal with my own violence and find my own niche.
I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.
I took a year and a half off, when my kid was born, because I didn't want to be one of those dads where the kid doesn't know who his dad is.
I did Wall Street, and then everything that happened with An Education took me up until March. I didn't want to work during that because there was just so much stuff. I didn't realize you had to go to so many parties. It was a nightmare! I had to go to all these parties! The glamour!
I was a really, really serious kid. And a really kind of controlling kid. Like I had things that, now, people would say are like - there's a name for many disorders as we know - but I would say, "If I pick this rubber band, then this will happen." It was that kind of want to control things, which I think all kids have to some extent.
Really the one thing that Pierce told me and that I've taken with me is to have fun doing it. As much as we dive into some serious characters and some serious situations and all that, you've got to enjoy it and remember that you're here to make entertainment and to make people have a nice time when they watch the movie. To me that was something I really took away.
As a kid, I just was a contract player at MGM Studios. They put me into goodness knows how many different roles.Some of them were wonderful and some of them were very just distasteful and awful because I was playing out of my age range and I was thoroughly uncomfortable, let's put it that way. So it took me many years to find my acting feet.
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