Billy Bob Thornton (born August 4, 1955) is an American actor, filmmaker, singer, songwriter, and musician.
I used to put that I studied with Stella Adler on my resume. I never met Stella Adler. But if you told a casting director you studied with Stella Adler all the sudden they'd let you in the door.
You read something and you just feel this makes sense. And sometimes before you even read it you have a feeling that yeah, I'm probably gonna do this one.
I know that I loved music before I loved movies, simply because I didn't see movies as a kid.
If you've written it you know exactly; whoever you're playing if you've written it you already know it. As a matter of fact, you've already made the movie if you wrote it. You've made it in your head.
Just the other day, my assistant was on the line with Calvin Klein. Golly, I usually shop at Sears.
I believe in running through the rain and crashing into the person you love and having your lips bleed on each other.
Kids won't watch older movies - they want to see what's hip right now.
Everything is very convenient now and it would be real nice if somehow people started going back to the movie theater. And it's people of my generation. It's their fault in a lot of ways, people over 40. It's their fault that the only movies are about robots and beautiful vampires. It's wild, all vampires are beautiful.
My process started when I was born. The process is life experience. I believe that what makes you an artist, or at least an artist who can communicate the ideas that they want to get across, are people that have life experience.
The movies I've made about the South, they were my experience and it's something that I know.
I'm really influenced by Southern novelists, not many movie people. More like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, and people like that.
When you're a kid, somebody's mid-forties, you think they're an old man. Then you grow up and it's like, I was a kid.
Directing takes a good chunk of your life out. It's a very hard thing. As an actor, you go in for a couple of months and do your job, and then you move onto another one. As a director, it's with you for quite some time and you're responsible for the entire thing, whether the results are good or bad, or whether people throw darts at you or put you on a pedestal.
I've gone through my periods. I've read the Bible completely, all the way through twice. I did it once when I was about 20 and I did it again when I was about 30.
I'm not a TV junkie outside of sports and history really and stuff like that.
These days movies are cut very quickly and sort of fragmented and I tend to do slower moving stories where people develop relationships with people. I think I'd probably do a lot better if I lived in Europe - I think it's more of a European sensibility somehow.
I know it's boring to say this but I always start with the script. I mean if it's well written and it's a character that I haven't necessarily played before.