I had no intention of replacing Arnold [Schwarzenegger]. There were a few things that made me want to do the movie. They were the script which had a different direction to it, and it was a chance to do a very different Quaid. I didn't read the short story until I went to college. Reading the story had a different effect on me of how I pictured him to be and the tone of the story was different. In the story, he's a bit more of an everyman.
So many times, you get a script and it says, "And then, the character cries," and you read the lines and think, "That would never make me cry. Those lines are so untruthful. " My approach is just to be honest to the situation.
I've always been better at informing the audience through images than through words, but I took on a script that was so dialogue-intensive, that the words had to do all the informing.
Sometimes you take a job for the money, sometimes you take it for the location, sometimes you take it for the script; there are just a number of reasons, and ultimately what you see is the whole landscape of it. But I can tell you from behind the scenes - that's what it is, as an actor.
I love Child's Play 2! That movie has a great theme: You better listen to children. That's why I wanted to do it. I was scared to do a horror movie - a blatant, studio horror movie - but I liked the script, and I thought that was such an important theme, because I don't think adults listen to children enough.
There are definitely reasons to do certain things, but I like to stick to good director, good actor, good script.
I don't like scripts leaking. On the other hand, the more real attention a script gets, the better.
There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare's.
Everything you do on set is directly related to your imagination when you read the script for the first time.
Cut the ending. Revise the script. The man of her dreams is a girl.
The difference between a movie star and a movie actor is this - a movie star will say, 'How can I change the script to suit me?' and a movie actor will say. 'How can I change me to suit the script?'
There are a couple hard things. One, getting a funny idea that people can relate to; a funny idea or a funny script; there's a million pitches.
People always say a script will be 'brought to life in a magical way,' but for me that has been proven wrong time and time again.
Finding a good script is really difficult and the scariest thing of all is when they say about a script that's not right, "we will fix it. . " It's like before you get on the Titanic and you see a big hole. In process, it's too late.
I just believe in the movie. I don't care what the book was like. I don't care what the previous film was like or other films were like. I care only about the script I've got.
And I sit in my jacuzzi with my script.
I've never known a situation in my career where a terrible script turned into a movie that was out of this world or was a success.
We with [ Marjane Satrapi] always work together on the script which is very important. We even film each other and we start to imagine things so that we are ready, because when you start shooting, it's pretty stressful.
When you do a rewrite, it's really about serving the director's vision, and what the director needs to go into that script.
Sometimes with these things all the pieces fall into place. I mean, we've been talking about this for years and we don't have the script now, but sometimes things fall into place very quickly, and if everything lines up it could happen.