When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
The kind of acting that's wholly literary or cerebral is wrong. It's useless for me to have actors so much in their heads that they can't be organic.
When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn't it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors.
I make films because I am endlessly fascinated by people. I'm fascinated immediately to know about the lives that are going on around me. That is what drives me. And that is because everybody matters, everybody is there to be cared about, everybody is interesting and everybody is the potential central character in a story. Judging people is not acceptable.
It's an unhealthy habit to say that life is what you make of it, and if you want to be happy, then you can be happy. That's just rubbish, basically. Life is about luck and it's about circumstances and socioeconomic conditions and all the rest of it, but you know, you can also make choices. It's about spirit and generosity and all the other things, too.
There have always been and there always will be the peripheral sideline activities which are a form of entertainment, which is to say you pay a couple of cents and you see something freakish. That is what reality TV is.
It's important to be true to the events, but the most important thing is to get to the essence of the experience. Not to be bogged down in an academic way by a notion of the truth. First of all, the truth is an illusive and spurious concept.
Two things have always been true about human beings. One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it's getting worse.
One of my first observations about New York that I was so fascinated with was that you'd be at a stoplight and you're with everybody; there's a homeless dude and some weird celebrity and a cop and someone who looks exactly like you. You're on foot and everyone is at street level and eye-to-eye. I think that's what's special about New York, because there's no hierarchy, there's no discrimination.
Politics gets me out of bed in the morning It's what really interests me. I'm a competitor, but I also feel like I'm contributing, whether it's working on health-care policy in the White House or out here in Chicago.
You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real.