Vincent D'Onofrio Quotes

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

I had a good time working with Russell Crowe, Ron Howard and Ed Harris. It was a great cast and Russell worked really hard, doing tons of research and questioning everything.

It's fun to play a dark character, but you go home at the end of the day not feeling very good about yourself. You go away feeling dirty. It seeps into the air.

All movies aren't fun; some are hard work. You try to do something and convey a set of emotions that have to do with some real life kind of stuff.

On 'The Messenger,' just imagining playing the part of a soldier in that movie was kind of hard for me. And in 'Rampart,' the idea of playing a cop was even harder. It was hard to imagine myself as a cop.

My first movie was 'Diner.' My second movie was 'Tender Mercies.' I did really good work.

For Kitty Gilbert in 'Topsy-Turvy,' I had to get to the point where I could improvise in the style of 1880, which is difficult. The research for that was huge.

With 'Black Rain,' I spent a lot of time with homicide detectives, and I spent a lot of time with different brokers on 'Wall Street.' It helps get the rhythm of the piece and the tone, and how overplayed or underplayed it might be. That's also the magic of movies: You get to hang out and live these different lives.

A book and a movie are different animals. You need a cinematic perspective to be involved in the motion pictures. And this is something I lack.

I never get scared making these kinds of movies because it's all make-believe, but I did cry when I saw the finished version of Man On Fire because it is so sad.

My job when I'm acting in a movie is very limited to playing a role. I'm not evaluating somebody. I'm only evaluating them insofar as they're interacting with me, but I'm not evaluating their skill set and I don't watch the movies, so I'm not aware of the way they're putting things together.

Donnie Brasco was great, but the energy on the set made it kinda hard to get in there and have an opinion.

Most films I've worked on have had large casts, but they've been wonderful people. I think the monkey in Pirates of the Caribbean is the most temperamental costar I've had. It would throw tantrums like you wouldn't believe.

I love playing really strung out characters, and characters that are really pushed to their limits and losing their mind.

I'm pretty mad at horror films for ruining my childhood.

The truth is - I found myself doing these huge action-adventure movies, and um, and which are cool man. And I really love doing them. And thankfully I haven't had too much dialogue, because if I had I would have really made a mess of it. You know what I mean?

For The Truman Show, I worked for a few weeks, do my gig, then I was done.

Filming 'Bad Santa' was really where I learned everything that I knew at that point about movies. That was really the first big thing that I had done.

Though I've been in horror movies, I just can't watch them. The first time I watched a 'Harry Potter' movie, I had nightmares for, like, two weeks.

I love making films, but the best roles are hard to come by.

Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies.

My death scene in 'The Salton Sea' is really weird. I mean, I get shot in the head. What experience can you possibly draw from? There's nothing you can compare it to, really.

I'd always envied actors who got to play real people or got to do research. I've always just had these scripts where, I mean not in a bad way, but it was right on the page.

Oh I had crushes on all my leading men, I think. Oh, you know who I really had fun with? In this movie 'Mother, Jugs & Speed,' I really liked working with Harvey Keitel.

I always want to abandon myself to my characters, and I never knew if I was actually abandoning myself to Lady Macbeth. I was scared to enter the darkness. Almost every day, I would go back home and be like, 'Oh my God, what am I doing?' I had no idea.