Spike Jonze Quotes

With kids you can take a chance but casting a guy at 45 is different. You don't discover somebody that age. If an actor hasn't made it by that time he probably has no talent.

I've worked with non-professional actors, I've worked with movie stars, I've worked with kids, I've worked with older people, and I've found my job as a director is to cast them well and to understand what they need on set to bring the material to life.

The kid in the episode [of Tales From The Darkside ] was played by Christian Slater! He was all of about 12 or so, but I've run into Christian many times since then, and he always does his line from Tales From The Darkside whenever he sees me.

We've now got a group of young people in this country who for all practical purposes are American. They grew up here. They've gone to school here. They don't know anything other than being American kids. But their parents may have brought them here without all the proper paperwork - might have brought them here when they were three, might have brought them here when they were five. And so, lo and behold, by the time they finish school, and they're ready to go to college, they find out they can't go to college and, in fact, their status as Americans are threatened.

I thought I started acting at 5 or 6, it was really when they were interviewing real families for a toothpaste commercial. They interviewed our family.

Don't take it out on the Muslims. Don't take it out on Latinos. Try to help us work together to create a country where your kids and you can have a decent standard of living. It has to be a bold and radical agenda.

The producers had seen "In a World..." and that's where they found me out and consequently sought me out for this role [in Man up].

Schools often box kids into predefined categories. But we don't know what amazing ideas, inventions, cures, and contributions all these youths really have.

When I was a kid you always heard about the Israeli army and you always heard about this tiny little country and how everyone around them wants them gone, and every time somebody comes after them they take care of business. And so as a Jewish kid you were proud of that.

I think of the kids that live on top of garbage dumps, I think of the ways we could reach out to other countries, I think of certainly climate change. There's so much. The nighttime is that time, is it not?

Obviously there are many, many ways of being an outsider, but having immigrant parents is one of them. For one thing, it makes you a translator: there are all kinds of things that American parents know about life in America ,and about being a kid in America, that non-American parents don't know, and in many cases it falls on the kid to tell them, and also to field questions from Americans about their parents' native country.

A fine genius in his own country is like gold in the mine.

There were many generations of Latino people coming to this country, coming from difficult political or social situations in their own countries, and they worked very hard to have their kids go to universities. Well, those kids came out and they are now doctors and architects, or they are on the Supreme Court. That has a reflection in Hollywood. So, we are actually very proud that our characters are Latinos, and I think it's good for diversity and cultural interaction.

I grew up, really, in the country.When I was a kid there were three country stores, a railroad depot, and a post office.

To be able to do it in the warmth and - of the White House and to do it around people who do care about my kids in a country that has been respectful of my children and their privacy, it has been less stressful than I would have imagined for me.

The New York Times - but the whole country gives it that weight. It's like the Asian kid in math class. Everybody in the media cheats off The New York Times.

Let me tell you what would be a really, really great project for all of us. Why don't we start mentoring kids? Whether we're liberal or conservative, why don't we start going into the schools and giving the kids a sense of their own purpose, their own self-worth, their future, and what they can learn from us? You know, if we're mentoring kids together, we might actually begin to talk to one another again and listen to one another. We have a big crisis all over the country and in our state on drugs.

Some people study a text very deeply. The people are my text. I study their words and what their words sound like, over and over again. When I was a kid, my grandfather said that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you." Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country. It doesn't matter how educated they are. By living in the world and living their experiences, they bring extraordinary truths. I try to do those truths justice.

Poor-country surf communities can be complex and, to some extent, leveling. The fisherman's kid is competing head to head with the plutocrat's gilded son. Your father can't buy you a good frontside hack.

My kids are from different countries, but there's an understanding, you don't have to like a country just because you were born in it. You need to respect all countries. And be very open to each other's, of course.

Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.

Personally, I don't tend to go into casting sessions. I try not to have a preconceived notion in my head because it just reduces my options or ability to find someone cool.

If the president of the country is not actually saying something, allowing equality to happen, how could you expect to counsel kids not to bully other kids? If they're not seeing that their society sees gay people as equals, how could you tell them what they're doing is wrong? With all this stuff going on, with the "Don't ask, don't tell" and things like that, we are second-class citizens, definitely. It just seems to me that it's hypocritical for us as a culture to say, "Bullying is a terrible thing," when really, they are just reflecting what the society is doing.

Every day I watched how a bare metal frame, rolling down the line would come off the other end, a spanking brand new car. What a great idea! Maybe, I could do the same thing with my music. Create a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door, an unknown, go through a process, and come out another door, a star.

I started acting when I was 9. I did smaller parts here and there as a kid, and then as I grew older I started resisting it, because I didn't like the idea of being, at the time, number four of the Skarsgård actors. So in high school I majored in science and was like, "Maybe I'll do something rebellious and become a doctor."