A lot of acting is about developing shorthand with somebody. If you're working with somebody you've known for a long time, you already have all that history.
A lot of people are not meant to be together.
All these young men who went off with a very romantic vision of war came back totally shattered. It created this hungry, restless, wandering, kind of ghostlike energy.
Any time you stop looking at evil as a black and white thing, it's helpful. So the fact that there won't be any obligatory Islamic terrorist stereotypes in movies any more, that'd be helpful.
Art is spiritual.
Being John Malkovich and Max were the best scripts I've read in the last six years.
Being on a movie set is like one long financial crisis.
Death is a billion-dollar business. They can't even pass a law where it takes seven days to get a gun. Why don't you have to go through the same kind of screening you do to get a driver's license? It's totally insane.
Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?
Everything is money in this town.
Good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not. It's like an affair with no mess.
Growing up in Chicago and being all over the States, we just took away the accent and some of the English language.
Growing up, the Irish, the Italians and the Jews, we all hung out together. Those groups seem to get it going pretty well.
Hitler wants to use his art to reinforce these romantic notions of war and to reconstruct the imperialist world to lead us to the next war.
Hitler was so modern, in that he was obsessed with being famous. He was caught up with this rush to be have achieved greatness before turning 30.
I didn't want to do any talk shows for the film, but then we had everyone, including the Mayor, saying, Please come to New York.
I don't have a real great knowledge of what my image is.
I don't know if anybody is straight, you know. In my experience, there are all these different shades in people.
I feel like I'm a filmmaker; I don't feel I need to yell action and cut.
I go back to the same old haunts, go back and drive the suburban streets. It's pretty eerie.
I guess maybe I'm idealistic.
I hate when people treat someone badly.
I have a bit of a rebellious nature.
I haven't figured out who to do a play with.
I knew two or three different record shops when I was growing up that had a Rob, a Dick and a Barry in them.
I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.
I love these movies where it's just about the film. You don't have my face on the poster. It's all about the movie. I like that.
I think when you get to the point where you don't need to be in love, then you could be in love. You have to just be OK with yourself-and that's a long process.
I was a teen star. That's disgusting enough.
I was never interested in being an overly public person.
I was raised Catholic until I was old enough to say no.
I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.
I wouldn't want to say all I can do is romantic comedies or courtroom dramas. I like to do different things, and I think directors are like actors in that way.
I'm OK in a crisis. I'm pretty good at crisis.
I've seen the people who talk about their love lives in print invariably have doomed relationships with the person they're talking about.
If there's a Democratic President in office, there doesn't seem to be a problem with attacking him. It's an interesting time.
If you do a movie about the victims of Nazis, I think that's much more easily digested. It's worth the investment. It asks a lot of tough questions. That's what a good film or a good piece of art might strive to do.
If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.
In any other business, you do something, and it's good. Michael Jordan makes the shot, he makes the shot.
It's a hard reality of the film world-there are different things to learn, and you came together to learn things, and then you see it's not going to work.
It's just a stunning reality when you think about people waiting to have opinions on something until they find out whether it's a money-maker.
Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.
Lots of people have very strong opinions about this town. Mine is that it's kind of a very sick place, where a lot of creativity happens.
Most males see themselves in Rob. Most guys have been where Rob's been, maybe not as down-and-out or as poor, or as obsessive about music, but most guys have walked that path that Rob has and I think that's what made the book so great and so universal.
New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.
People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.
Right now the propaganda machine is gearing us up toward war. Every time I hear the Showdown With Saddam theme music, I get chills.
Some people saw themselves as Germanic, rather than Jewish, and some saw their identity as Jewish first and Germans second.
Some people, yeah, they'll just go, Oh yeah, it's cool with all those people getting shot.
Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you've known them for a long time.
Supposedly, you're making maybe art, or you're making a film that's valid. But in this town, that's an essential failure. That's kind of sick.
The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them. It also makes me think they're very intelligent.
The film is not a success until it makes money. It's only good when there's a dollar figure attached to the box office.
The more you expose yourself as a celebrity, the less interesting you are to watch in your work, because if you're putting yourself out there all the time, you're not holding anything back.
The people who are covering politics don't question whether that's right or not. It's a very successful con job. We've stopped questioning that it's all theater. It's just disgusting.
The reason bin Laden staggered the planes going into the towers was so every camera would be focused on the second tower when the plane hit. It was not only the murder, but the perpetual image of the horror that permeated into people's consciousness.
There are some good people. But a good chunk of them will lie for no reason at all - it'll be ten o'clock and they'll tell you it's nine. You're looking at the clock and you can't even fathom why they're lying. They just lie because that's what they do.
Usually I play people who just keep babbling on and on and on.
When applied to politics and taken to its extreme, kitsch is the mask of death. Fascism was all aesthetics. There was no core principle to it. There was no truth to it.
You couldn't say what you wanted if you were president.
John was considered for the role of Paul Brenner in the movie The General's Daughter. In the end the role went to John Travolta because John was to young at the time.
He as originally chosen to play John Bender in the movie The Breakfast Club. The role ended up going to Judd Nelson.
John's favorite music group is The Clash.
He used to be roommates with actor Jeremy Piven.
He tried out for the role of Madmartigan in the movie Willow but lost the role to Val Kilmer.
John turned down Bill Paxton's role in the movie Apollo 13.
John attended one semester of college at NYU.
John has a production company called New Crime Productions which produced the movies Grosse Pointe Blank, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Jack Bull. He founded the company with two of his high school friends Steve Pink & D.V. DeVincentis.
He and his good friend Tim Robbins made 6 movies together: Bob Roberts (1992), Cradle Will Rock (1999), High Fidelity (2000), The Player (1992), The Sure Thing (1985) and Tapeheads (1988).
He was ranked #15 on Tropopkin's Top 25 Most Intriguing People [Issue #100].
He is the subject of the song "Honorable Mention" by the band Fall Out Boy.
He turned down Woody Harrelson's role in the movie Indecent Proposal.
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