If you do movies that are modestly budgeted, the way they finance them is they figure out how they can sell them.
If you play a king, it's better if everybody treats you like a king.
I don't have kids. Maybe that's kept me young. I have a wife for almost 50 years and she looks after me a little bit like I was seven years-old.
I've made quite a number of movies that I've never even seen and I've made some movies that I thought were good that nobody saw... Sometimes they end up on television.
I've never made a movie I wasn't surprised to see.
Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. I never know how successful a movie is going to be - when you make a movie you're always hoping for the best.
As an actor I'm rather hit and miss, I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't. But this is a nice part.
Older actors, and women in particular, are getting more opportunities. It pleases me, its very good news for us. They say that people are living longer, and maybe it's just that there's more of us out there.
You never forget how to dance. It's just a matter of your bones working and things like that.
Sometimes a certain innocence is good, but not about yourself.
Death is wonderful because you can't think about it. How are you gonna think about it?
I know that whenever I think about death, I come up against a stone wall.
One of the difficult things about being an actor is to stick around.
I've made a couple of movies in the jungle, and I don't want to go back to the jungle.
I have always refused to do something that has offended me. I have been offered potential roles that are totally vulgar.
I want to make movies on a soundstage. They close the door and it's nighttime, daytime. If it has to rain, they make the rain. That's what I like.
I was never a child actor. I was a child performer.
I play disturbed people a lot, but always with a bit of distance or tongue-in-cheek. Most of the villains I play are essentially harmless.
I think I'm getting a little bit of Alzheimer's. Just a little.
People think that my favorite roles to do are villains, but I find comedy to be the most challenging and rewarding.
I love spaghetti. And I like to cook spaghetti. And I used to eat it every day. I weighed thirty pounds more than I do now. You can't - you can't do that.
There probably aren't a lot of actors my age who tap dance.
They have a kind of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby thing going on.
The thing about cooking is it's so interesting to watch. I don't know why, but if you go to somebody's house and they're making something, they usually say interesting things while they're cooking.
Well, I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades in show business for a long time. I was a singer and a dancer and then I got a job as an actor.
I think that if I had grown up and had been in show business and the movies twenty five, thirty years earlier, I think I would have made a lot more musical movies.
I think the fact that I was raised in show business, in New York City, in the '50s, that's affected my personality to the point that I'm a little different.
To me, there are things you're good at and things you're not so good at. For some reason, I'm good at darker characters. It has to do with how you look.
I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people. Unsavory guys. I think it's my face, the way I look.
I've made three musical movies which is pretty good considering that not many are made but I was lucky in other ways. I came along when independent movies were starting to boom.
The best thing for me is, when I'm not working, is to be at home and to have a script or two scripts is better, and to be just walking around the house and just thinking about the lines.
I'm not much of an analyzer or a psychologist.
Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.
Is typecasting really a problem?
My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.
My background is in musical comedy. I didn't know I was going to be an actor. But all my points of reference have to do with musical comedy and in being kind of a showoff.
I have been in movies that I thought I wasn't very good in.
I became an actor by accident.
My father passed away a couple of years ago, but he was very old. He was almost a 100 years old. And, you know, he had a very good life. He came to America and he had a good life.
Usually directors hire me because I'm what they are looking for. But once in a while, and it's very rare, they will hire me and then try to make me over.
When I was a kid I joined the circus. I did that. It is true. But it's not like you think. There was a guy, he had his own circus. His name was Carol Jacobs and he owned it. It was a small thing.
Some people can do things and get away with it. Comics are famously like that. Why is it that some guys can say the most horrible things and it's not offensive, it's funny?
By the time I was 7, I did walk-ons, catalogue modeling, you name it. In the Queens where I grew up, you didn't go bowling on Saturday; you went to dancing school.
My background is in musical comedy.
I've made movies that we're very successful that we're a complete surprise, and I've made movies that I thought we're going to be very successful that, you know.
I come from a part of New York that was almost entirely immigrants. I was born in America, but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe.
I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy - or, I don't tend to get those parts. I've tended to play eccentrics. I've played a lot of villains, of course.
I never know when I am being funny, and the other way too. I don't think you can think about that. I don't think you can try to be funny. Some people are just funny.
I play a lot of, maybe a little bit, cartoonish people. I've been a Bond villain, and I play a lot of villains, people who want to take over something.
I think the fact that I grew up in show business had a real effect on my personality. If you were born in New York during the golden age of television, and you grew up on Broadway, that marks you.
When videotape came so a lot of movies that I do have a kind of afterlife in video. Things where movies that I do would come and go; they still come and go but you can go rent them and see them on TV.
I think that sometimes when they see me in a movie they expect me to be something nasty. I mean, I play a lot of villains and you show up and they think maybe... That's why it's good to defy expectations sometimes.
I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.
I think if you do something effectively whether you're the lover or the comic or the action guy or the villain like I play; movies are very expensive to make. Chances are you'll get asked to play that part again.
I became an actor by accident. I suppose I figured since I was in musical comedy from the time I was a teenager, I suppose I figured that I'd always been in that world to some extent.
Onstage I have a natural chutzpa that audiences like. I'm out there.
It's very hard to get a movie made. You could spend your life reading scripts that never got made.
I think that weddings have probably been crashed since the beginning of time. Cavemen crashed them. You go to meet girls. It makes sense.
Obvious things like The Deer Hunter. After that happened, the scripts got better. Opportunities happened.
A job leads to a job, just like anything else, and it became apparent that this was probably what I was going to keep doing.
I became an actor kind of by accident. I was in musical theater and I got a job as an actor in a play and kept going. But I never set out to be an actor; it happened over time.
I live sort of in the country and I like that. It's very quiet, it's beautiful.
In England, and all over Europe, and all over the world, actors act until they die. They get old, really old, and they're still working. They just keep doing it.
I have made a number of movies that I have never seen. It's not a matter of ego. It's a matter of being disappointed. It's really a shame. It's just as difficult to make a movie that no one cares about as to make a hit.
It's true in most movies I don't use my own voice.
All actors do what they do differently, and it doesn't matter.
I grew up in music theater playing to the audience - singing and dancing and showing off. That's really my background. But the camera's different. I think I'm more at home on stage.
I suppose in order to succeed at something you have to be very persistent. I've never done that.
I have boxes full of stuff. Most actors do have a trunk full of stuff, paintings or scripts. It never comes to anything.
I don't need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own.
My father was a lesson. He had his own bakery, and it was closed one day a week, but he would go anyway. He did it because he really loved his bakery. It wasn't a job.
![I got [Muhammad Ali's boxing shorts] for $40 at an auction. Nobody wanted them. I have them framed in my house.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/christopher-walken-117633.jpg)
I got [Muhammad Ali's boxing shorts] for $40 at an auction. Nobody wanted them. I have them framed in my house.
There are places I don't want to go. Making movies on tops of mountains, in the desert, playing scenes while icy torrents of rivers rush by. The jungle. It's very uncomfortable.
Morning is the best time to see movies.
I don't usually get to play fathers or grandfathers or uncles. Now that I'm older, maybe I can play people closer to myself. I'd like that.
I don't have a lot of hobbies. I don't play golf. I don't have any children. Things that occupy people's time. I just try to take jobs.
I'll tell you, Quentin Tarantino really writes the most amazing dialogue.
I'm not sure I'd write a good cookbook, but I might make a good cooking show.
I've been to Chicago a lot - it's one of my favorite places. My wife is from Chicago, and I worked in the theater there a lot.
It's interesting - a lot of good actors are good mimes. But I'm terrible. If I tried to do an impression, nobody would know what I was doing.
It's what actors call a big, juicy part, when you're a leading man. I don't get a lot of those. I get a lot of supporting things.
Movies are terrifically optimistic enterprises.
I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.
I don't play lovers. I wish I did. At least once I'd like to have a crack at one of those guys. A heartbreaker. Some people are born to it. I'm not.
I remember from when I use to be a dancer, there is an expression among dancers, I had a T-shirt that said: SHUT UP AND DANCE.
I always like to watch comics and it's interesting that you can tell if someone's funny in 10 seconds.
I don't carry lucky charms, but I believe in those things.
Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.
A man can be an artist... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece.
To be honest, I was never very ambitious. And I still am not.
Also, I think there are huge reactions sometimes, which are also mysterious.
It's not necessarily how many minutes you're on screen, it's the material you have. It's more important what it is you have to do than the amount of time you're there.
In rehearsal you have a good accident that you can repeat.In the movies if you have a good accident you hope the camera's running.
No, but way before that, I've been doing little dances in movies for years. Yeah, that was an amazing chance. You know, at my age to be able to do a music dance video, very unusual.
I've made one or two movies that I haven't even seen, because they were never released. I have made things that I never even saw. But I will always go see the movie I'm in.
Well, you know what they say. A bullet always tells the truth.
I don't much like being directed. I enjoy being allowed to play.
I look for good possibilities in movies. I don't look for perfection.
Usually in the first performances I'm completely panicked. And I pull myself together. By the time you get to the end of the play, you really start to have fun.
It's impossible for me to play a part without thinking about the audience.
There's an impression that actors make a lot of choices. I just take what's there.
I have a lot of trouble with scripts. I have a lot of trouble imagining things while I'm reading them.
