Money doesn't mean anything to me. I've made a lot of money, but I want to enjoy life and not stress myself building my bank account. I give lots away and live simply, mostly out of a suitcase in hotels. We all know that good health is much more important.
I've had the opportunity to work with so many great directors. Different styles, as well, like Gus Van Sant. He just does the casting and the milieu and let's you do your thing, quietly. Bertolucci, who can talk to you about your internal world in quite a creative way or just say, 'Well, put your hand over here.'
I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like 'Man of Tai Chi' just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I'm looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.
The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew's cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo's choice to know the truth. It's a beautiful, beautiful story.
But I think we're also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They've seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There's so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.
I don't know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It's also changing how we're telling stories.
I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It's embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.
I'm not a photographer, so I didn't get into F-stops or ND filters or background, foreground, cross-light, all that stuff. But I was interested in the camera and the lenses. That's the world that I'm moving in, in terms of acting and giving a performance.
Oftentimes, when we think of 3D, we think of things coming out of the screen, but actually, you've got this zero, this negative space, what they call the negative space, which is the scene, what's being filmed in the positive space of the audience. As you can have things come out, you can have all of this depth.
I loved the material when I first read it, and the experience of making the film was a great one. So when we came around to complete the trilogy, I just signed on board without even reading the scripts because the experience of the first film was so good.
You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it's been something I've been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it's something I hope to continue because it's interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor.