Quotes

[regarding moving so many times as a child] I would lie in bed the night before a new school and decide who I was going to be. It would usually be based on someone I admired from the school before.

"I just feel like I really want to be someone who literally disappears in the role. I want to be so strong as an actor that people wouldn't say [for example] 'Oh, that's Ben Affleck.' To me, that's just boring. It doesn't interest me. My goal is to always have the ability at hand where I can be really good, as opposed to, eh, that's Josh Lucas." Interview with Steve Head, September 24, 2002.

(2015, on Undertow) It's a pretty amazing film. It's flawed and dark and troubled, but it's somewhat based on a true story that Terrence Malick had heard from a child. My understanding is that they found the child dead the day he had called Malick while working in a runaway shelter. Malick had worked on the script for years and then when he saw George Washington, he gave it to Green and we made this tiny budget movie I think really is Southern gothic at its best. The character was horribly difficult to play because he's a man who basically kills his own children. For me, it was a real artistic, psychological experience because I was trying to figure out what kind of mind could do this. Trying to figure out how to make that character anything other than what he could've been on paper: a violent monster.

(2015, on Glory Road) It's my favorite film of my career. There's multiple reasons as to why, but primarily it was the experience of making it. I had not only the real Don Haskins, who was a mentor to me before and after the film, but then I had people like Pat Riley as my technical advisor. And we had this group of actors, many of whom had never really acted before. They were basketball players who were doing some acting, and I was put in a position by the director of the movie to be the coach; to deal with them and coach them, and be, in a sense, in charge of the acting from these guys. Every day I felt this responsibility to do the Disney version of that story-the true story is much darker-but we were very much making a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, and that's what Don Haskins wanted. We had a lot of tools from a financial standpoint to tell a wonderful story of a breakthrough in American racial relations.

Then, the best publicity tour of my life was these guys on Jerry Bruckheimer's private airplane, going from one town to the other showing the movie. Every single night that movie would get a standing ovation. Then we would have this crazy party and we'd get back on Jerry's airplane with this group of basketball actors and go to the next party. And they would find girls.

There was a weird moment where we showed the movie in El Paso, Texas, to the real basketball players in the original story. And they did not like it at all. They felt like I completely missed how badass Don Haskins really was... I was really upset and sad about it. Then Don Haskins came to me and said, "Fuck those guys. You did exactly what I wanted you to do. You did the version that I wanted for the kids." And then all those guys really came around to the movie, and they felt like the movie existed on its own.

(2015, on J. Edgar) Look, I tried something when my career was really struggling: reaching out to people, to filmmakers I wanted to work with. I genuinely wrote a letter to Clint Eastwood saying, "Hey man, I'm a fan and I would be an extra in your movie." Because of it, through his casting team, asked me whether I would be interested in auditioning for the part of Lindbergh. Movies and life become a little more symmetrical when you start asking for and looking for connections. My grandmother was called a WASP. She was one of the first pilots in the United States. She flew with Amelia Earhart and was in love with Lindbergh. She flew in the war and commercially, so I felt there was a great symmetry for me to play this man. It's just one of those moments where it all started to make sense again. I think the movie is actually fascinating, because here you have one of the great rogue, Republican male figures of heterosexuality, Clint Eastwood, making this weird little gay love story. It's an eccentric film that's trying to tell this story of a clearly fucked-up man. I don't think Eastwood is going back and analyzing his movies. He's fearlessly creating, and has built himself an empire that allows him to jump from movie to movie to movie. I found him to be childlike and full of sparkle and joy of film.

(2015, on Session 9) This was a motherfucker for me because it's the movie that started me smoking cigarettes. I had never smoked cigarettes prior in my life, and the character chain-smoked. That first night, after smoking scene after scene, I went home, threw up, and I was a smoker.

(2015, on making American Psycho) I was a little nervous. I hadn't really done much, film-wise, and had done a little TV. I hadn't done anything with real pressure on it. But I would say American Psycho had real pressure on it because of the extraordinary book. Mary Harron had busted her ass to keep the job of the director and also to have the visions that she had for it-which were definitely different from the book. She was incredibly specific, wanting Christian Bale for the lead role... On my first day at work I'm with Willem Dafoe and Bale, and I was really fucking nervous. And I drove to set in a van with Dafoe and I said, "I'm really nervous." Dafoe turns back at me: "Man, I am too. If you're not nervous, there's a problem." I've taken that advice for the rest of my career. I feel like that movie really stood the test of time, and all those memories are still close with me because they are some of my earliest ones.

(2015) Poseidon was difficult... When I first accepted it, I had serious reservations because I felt the script wasn't ready after I already said yes. I had a very bad feeling about the movie after I had said yes, so I tried to back out of it. And I was unsuccessful at backing out of it. The pressure came from all sorts of levels, from Warner Bros. to my friend at the time, Akiva Goldsman, who had written the script, to my agents. They were telling me it was going to be a big, huge movie. And I had this bad premonition, not necessarily about the quality of the movie, but about the fact that I was going to get hurt making it. It was a relentlessly difficult movie to make. Everyone involved in that movie was hospitalized, if not once, multiple times. In the end I took a gnarly fall, was hit by a water cannon, and I ripped by thumb almost off of my hand, and had to have very serious reconstructive surgery the day after the movie finished.

The movie was a very dark spot in my career, and I think the movie is actually pretty damn good, but it didn't perform well in the U.S. That movie, combined with the lack of performance of Stealth, was a real one-two punch to my career. It really shut my career down, from a Hollywood standpoint. It kicked my ass and took me out of the game for awhile, which after something like Glory Road, was extraordinarily heartbreaking to me.

Honestly, from a box office or commercial filmmaking standpoint, I've never recovered from it. And I'm totally okay with that... It took me awhile, though. That level of movie stardom and movie pressure was overwhelming me. I wasn't very happy in that period of my life, and I was working too much on projects were maybe rushed. I know why I did Poseidon... because Das Boot is one of the great action movies of all time and Wolfgang [Petersen, Poseidon's director] said to me, "I'm going to remake Das Boot." And to an extent, he did, although a somewhat Hollywood version of that. But we just didn't have a script.

(2015, on the box office failures of Poseidon, Stealth, and Glory Road derailing his career) The reality was-and I'm not just saying this to justify it-I wasn't particularly happy and was overwhelmed by the movies. Soon after I became scared financially, became scared from a career standpoint. I wasn't even getting independent films suddenly because I had become, not box office poison, but people said, "Oh, he's not working as a film star." So I had to say, "What the fuck am I, if not that?" And I said to myself, "Josh, you did this job because you love acting and storytelling and playing characters." I did a tiny play. I started going back to doing these movies that were personal filmmaking. Even there for a couple of years I kind of missed. I did movies that were indulgent. Too tonally inaccessible. They didn't work. They had no commercial viability. But Hide Away is a movie I really love. I worked my ass off there, and I poured my soul into that movie and it wasn't even released. It was a very lonely and very scary time.

And has it shifted? Not necessarily, I'm still here fighting for The Mend, because I think it's a very worthy movie and I know that some people will love it. I think my performance is raw and borderline dangerous. I'm hoping that some people find it. Then you start making bigger life decisions, man. I had a kid. I went through a tough divorce and I went through a period of time where I was really tested. My career wasn't going well; my life wasn't going well. And I was having to really look at myself in the mirror to figure out what I'm going to do to get through this.

Honestly, I probably chose a very commercial TV project, and to be number two, so I could spend more time with my son and take care of him in the early years of his life. I was making choices that were very specific: Make a living, take care of your family, and if you can, find some movies that you can sink your teeth into. And just not worry about whether anyone sees them or not. Have the goal be the experience of making it. If I could walk away from it and feel I had learned something, that had to become enough, because otherwise I would've kept waiting for validation from commercial or critical successes.

There's nothing abnormal about my experience. And look, you know who said the best thing to me? Alec Baldwin. I was sitting at a sushi restaurant, and I knew him vaguely. He said, "Hey man, whatever happens, don't let them make you believe that when you fall from the movie star tree that you're rotted fruit." He put it so beautifully, because he said, "Everyone falls." And it's true. Everyone falls. What happens to so many actors, when they fall, is that they get really fucked up and broken and usually are gone. Those weird eccentric talents like Christopher Walken or Mickey Rourke-who fall from that tree-and they're just so whacked-out interesting that they come back and have these resurrections. But a lot of people just disappear. It's incredibly rare for someone to live in an incredibly exalted way for huge periods of time. The Meryl Streeps of the world are total anomalies.