Quote collection
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"I hit the ground running, without a lot of training, so I had to do whatever I could do to survive as a professional, and if that meant being that character 24/7 and acting out, I was going to do that. I lived those characters, I brought them home with me."
"I will promise you that if I can give you two good scenes -- which is what I always try to do in every movie -- then I feel like I'm doing my job."
"There is a misperception, if you will, in critical response or even in Hollywood, that I can only do exaggerated characters. Or what they would call over-the-top performances. Well, this is completely false."
"When I won the Oscar, I made a point of actively going against that and doing adventure films like 'Con Air' and 'Gone in 60 Seconds,' not what would be expected."
"I think that movies can help guide us through those experiences [the problems that are happening in our daily lives, the stresses between countries, the economy and global warming]. I think all art tries to grapple with, redefine, come to terms with, express what's happening now when it's working. You can be entertained, but you can also be stimulated to think about things."
"My direction as a person working in film has been to never get comfortable with anything I was doing. At the time that I decided to do action films, people were telling me, "Well, you can't do it. You're not that type. It's not going to work." And so obviously that made me think, "Well, that's not comfortable. Maybe I should try it. What can I do with it?" So I did that, and I'm glad I did it. I'll probably do it again, and I did other kinds of things that seemed like challenges for me, because I like being on the high wire."
"I've been lucky to work with some of the most creative people and it's true that I enjoy filmmaking and I'm an enthusiast."
"I've always maintained that I see myself as a student. There's always something to learn and be challenged by and hopefully grow from."
"I try not to be proud. I try to actively attack pride."
"Often you hear stories about never working with children. I disagree because children still have that residual magical thinking. They haven't had their imagination knocked out of them by turning into adults and life experiences."
"I'm not a trained actor. I'm someone who is autodidactic and learned on my own."
"I'm not really interested in playing famous people. I prefer to create characters. And I hope I have an exciting enough life that somebody might make a movie about that one day. I don't want to make movies about other people. I was once approached about playing Salvador Dali, which I thought would've been fun until I found out that he was proud of kicking a blind man across the street. So, I decided, I didn't want to play that guy. So, I think I'll just keep it the way it is."
"I think the paparazzi might have chased me out of Los Angeles."
"Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth. What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?"
"One of the first signs of being depressed is that you lose interest in things. That's why I think it is important to stay passionate."
"It may come as a surprise to people, but I'm actually quite boring and normal. What do I do? I read books. I drive my kid to school. I have lunch with my wife. I pick my kid up from school. I go home."
"I haven't made anything I don't believe in. I've always started a movie with a song in my heart, and even when I'm a little unclear about it, something magical happens and it comes into focus in a way that I'm feeling good about."
"Actors, their greatest tool, their greatest resource is imagination. You can take things, power objects, you can recruit your dreams, you can access your memories and get there. So the idea is not to act but to just be."
"At a young age, I was interested in comic books, which was really how I learnt to read. The name Cage came from a comic book character called Power Man."
"And what I like about it is it makes me happy and I think it makes a lot of people happy to go to the movies and to not think about the problems of the day or the problems of tomorrow or the yesterday and just go on for the ride and have the fun of losing oneself in a fantasy."