Keanu Reeves belongs to an increasingly rare breed of actors in modern Hollywood. He is a big movie star, whose involvement in a project is often enough to make it a commercial success. However, he continues to maintain an incredible level of humility in his life. His life has been marred by several tragedies, including the deaths of a friend, former wife, and stillborn daughter. He is very close to his family, a doting brother to his three sisters and a dutiful son to his mother. Deeply spiritual, he does not adhere to any particular religion. He is greatly passionate about martial arts and motorcycles and utterly indifferent about the accumulation of more wealth. We have collected several of his quotes from various interviews, articles, and speeches. Here are some of the things that he has to say about acting, cinema, religion, spirituality, success, and life in general.
But I did 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.' They made a cereal out of it, so once you've had a cereal, it doesn't get much more surreal than that. Surreal cereal.
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 have definitely been curious and involved in the process; even as a young actor. I was always looking at where the camera was, what story it was telling. And as my experience grew, I wanted to know even more.
I was always interested - I mean, it's kind of part of your job - I was always interested in the camera.
Keanu Reeves
And of course to work with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, and work with a wonderful, beautiful script directed by Nancy Meyers, it was really for me a dream come true.
I've been really fortunate to be able to do different kinds of films in different scales, different genres, different kinds of roles, and that is important to me.
I just felt that if I went into Speed 2, I just... wouldn't have come up out of the water.
Keanu Reeves
I think - I don't know, maybe it's nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be - it's gone. It's going to be gone.
I used to have nightmares that they would put 'He played Ted' on my tombstone.
Keanu Reeves
When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.
Keanu Reeves
But, you know, it's still a drag to get your picture taken when you're eating a sandwich. It's a downer.
Here comes 40. I'm feeling my age and I've ordered the Ferrari. I'm going to get the whole mid-life crisis package.
Keanu Reeves
'Speed' and 'Point Break' were a lot of running and jumping, and then 'The Matrix Trilogy' had a lot of fights and wire work and green screen elements.
Keanu Reeves
It's the journey of self, I guess. You start with this kind of loner, outside guy, which a lot of people can relate to, and he goes out into the world.
Basically it starts with four months of training, just basic stretching, kicking and punching. Then you come to the choreography and getting ready to put the dance together.
I think the form, the Hollywood movie, I think the quality is obviously always going to be there and I think that the question of taste, there's always a question of taste.
People were saying that David Geffen and I had gotten married and it just blew me away. Not that they thought I was gay, but that they thought I could land a guy that hot.
The whole aspect of cinema and film festivals should be a moment to come together and celebrate art and humanity. It would be a shame if there was such a divide.
Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don't have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.
It's easy to become very self-critical when you're an actor. Then you get critiqued by the critics. Whether you agree with them or not, people are passing judgment on you.
Energy can't be created or destroyed, and energy flows. It must be in a direction, with some kind of internal, emotive, spiritual direction. It must have some effect somewhere.
Keanu Reeves
I have a producing partner named Stephen Hamel, and we've been trying to generate material.
How do people relate to movies now, when they're on portable devices or streaming them? It's not as much about going to the movies. That experience has changed.
I'm Mickey Mouse. They don't know who's inside the suit.
Keanu Reeves
It's always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you're seeing the most beautiful thing on God's Earth.
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 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 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.
Keanu Reeves
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'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.
Keanu Reeves
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.
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.
Keanu Reeves
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.
