I so desperately hate to end these movies that the first thing I do when I’m done is write another one. Then I don’t feel sad about having to leave and everybody going away. That’s why I tend to work with the same people; I really befriend them.
Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at many restaurants and could only drink from water fountains marked ‘Colored.’ When I went to the movies, I would have to sit in the Colored balcony.
Hollywood, we get it. The Christian faith just doesn’t work for you ‘in the long run.’ However, for a large percentage of this country (the same country that makes your movies millions of dollars), it does. So please, for all of our sakes, keep your ‘beliefs to yourself’ and just ‘stop the hate.’
Honestly, not being evasive, but the great thing about Bond is that I have fifty years of movies – 23 movies and all the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, all of which are fodder. And when I’m working on the new Bond, I’m constantly going back to Fleming and the other movies – what are the bits and pieces, what are the resonances?
When the Beatles came in, I really concentrated on making a lot of movies. Those beach films that we did were a lot fun. They hit with an audience that related to what we were trying to do on the screen. That kept me going all through that Beatle period.
I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that’s why, over the years, in my movies I’ve had characters who didn’t care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.
I wanted to do another movie that could make us laugh and cry and feel good about the world. I wanted to do something else that could make us smile. This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.
We’ve been shooting the last two weeks with a lot of vampires. I don’t want to give away too much, but if you’ve read the books, it’s the standoff with lots of vampires in play. There’s like 70 people going through the works at once. It’s a little maddening, but fun. We shot pretty much the ending of the two movies the other day.
When I was a kid, I was in all ‘The Mighty Ducks’ movies, and that sort of created this weird thing when I was very young. And luckily, I had a lot of really good friends and family that kept me from, I guess, going down a more negative path that actors can go down.
I’d watch old movies with Judy Garland, Shirley Temple and Bette Davis and long to be part of that glamorous world. A lot of that glamour is gone now. In my own small way, I hope I’m bringing some of it back. But it would be great if I could inspire women to dress up.
It seems to me that one thing people do over and over again is try to figure out how to get married, stay married, fall in love, how to rekindle all this stuff. It seems to me to be a pretty eternal theme so I don’t know if you can get typecast from making movies about men relating to women. It seems to be what is going on on the planet a lot.
When TV came, people said who will go to theatres to watch movies? When the Internet came, they said the same. And now it’s the digital media… The doomsday predictions are always there but I don’t think people will stop going to cinema halls because that is one experience you can’t get at home.
The comic is today’s western, so many movies, and I think that if actors want to optimize their longevity, it’s important for them to meet the fans because those fans are so loyal and will show up at any movie or tune in to any television show they’re on.
Obviously ‘Pete’s Dragon’ is more commercial than ‘A Ghost Story,’ but when making them, I’m just trying to tell a story that matters to me, that ultimately would satisfy me as a moviegoer. Because watching movies is my favorite thing to do. I watch a lot of them.
Had I not done Shakespeare, Pinter, Moliere and things such as ‘Godspell’ – I played Judas in a hugely successful production before I did ‘Elm Street’ – I’d probably be on a psychiatrist’s couch saying: ‘Freddy ruined me.’ But I’d already done 13 movies and years of non-stop theatre.
The problem with my mind is it sways from side to side. The idea of me fantasizing about becoming an actor quickly led to depression. ‘No, it was never going to happen to me.’ I was a sixteen-year-old kid on the other side of the world from where they made movies. Scottish actors never really got play. There was Sean Connery, and that was it.
I’m an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He’s somebody, along with Vincent Price, who I celebrate, and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre.
‘In A World…’ changed my life a thousand per cent. I feel thankful that something I believed in so much – I love dialect, so I dedicated five years of my life to making a film about it – yielded such rewards. It led to ‘Man Up,’ as well as ‘No Escape,’ which comes out later this year… two movies where I am the female lead.
I don’t know if I’d want to be a Secret Service agent. In the movies, it’s exciting and romantic and all that. Really, most of their job is standing in a hallway for 12 hours making sure somebody doesn’t come through a doorway off of a stairwell.
There’s no reason my films can’t work as hard as VR does to hook an audience and never let them go, so I think that that it turns the volume up a little bit on storytelling. The same way when I was doing commercials and then I went and shot ‘Go,’ and ‘Go’ has a level of pace that is unlike any of my other movies.
Sure, you can do something frothy and ridiculous, but you should probably be confident that it’s going to be a sure-fire hit. Then it’s sensible, because it enables you to make smaller movies. But if you make something frothy and ridiculous that doesn’t work, it’s not worth it.
When I’m doing a movie, I’m not doing anything else. It’s all about the movie. I don’t have a wife. I don’t have a kid. Nothing can get in my way… I’ve made a choice, so far, to go on this road alone. Because this is my time. This is my time to make movies.
In the ‘50s, audiences accepted a level of artifice that the audiences in 1966 would chuckle at. And the audiences of 1978 would chuckle at what the audience of 1966 said was okay, too. The trick is to try to be way ahead of that curve, so they’re not chuckling at your movies 20 years down the line.
The success of the storytellers – we’re only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience – it’s so much a part of their enjoyment. It’s one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.
I’m pretty upfront about my love and admiration for the military. One of the perks of making movies is that you get to sort of follow your own passions, and I believe quite passionately that we don’t pay enough attention and respect to our veterans. Not just our wounded veterans, but all veterans.
