After we finished his scene, Dad wrote me a letter saying that in his 41 years of making motion pictures, he had never seen a crew so devoted to their director, nor a director so devoted to his crew.
All the technical advances have made it interesting for that inexplicable thing called acting, and it's allowing directors to go out and do their thing.
Bob Dylan is out of the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg.
Brando, any of those are like a backbone on which you can build a skeleton and put flesh and blood in.
Brando's a family friend. His mother gave my father a shot to be in a play at the Omaha Community Playhouse. That was the first production he was in.
Every director is so different from every other one.
Everyone always has a different perception of you.
Getting out from under the shadow of Henry Fonda was difficult.
He was an extraordinary actor. The neat part was acting with him. He said, I don't know why you give yourself that kind of trouble, son. But for me, there was no trouble.
He wrote, You are a very good director, son, and I love you very much. Your dad. He had never used those words with me before. I passed that letter around the company. For without the company, the letter would never have been written.
He'd gone back into the hospital and I knew this really was it. I thought, Here comes the test. Can we look each other in the eyes? He grabbed me by the shoulders. He said, I love you very much, Son.
Henry Fonda's son: That's how everybody identified me until Easy Rider came along. Good old Captain America.
Her heart was in the right place, but her head wasn't.
How could I find out who he was if I was trying to be his son and had no idea who I was myself?
I always seemed to disappoint them. They expected me to be different than Henry or exactly like Henry. I was neither.
I could see the concern on Jane's face and how she didn't want to tell me that she didn't think it was a very good movie.
I don't trust anybody who didn't inhale.
I got to play a character that required me to throw everything heavy away. No one thought I could handle this kind of character or do multidimensional stuff.
I have always maintained that society has no business dictating morality.
I just want to continue finding actors' directors.
I knew Henry Fonda was my father, but I didn't know who I was. They all thought of me as Henry Fonda's son. Unfortunately for them, they never got to know me.
I knew, in 1965, that I was on the wrong road for the kind of person I was. I had to change things.
I know I'm responsible for not having got the kind of roles that I'd have liked to. '
I know what it's like to be a young actor.
I like working with myself. I have the knack for it.
I love to direct my daughter, and act with her, and we both want to work with Jane again.
I often wondered why I didn't get a chance to read for certain parts, but then I was pretty much a rebellious character in Hollywood once I figured out people were only interested in deals.
I pretty well knew Dad was dying early on, and decided that I was not going to let him out of here without closing.
I realized, if you have to carry a card, you're not an independent.
I think I have strength, the qualities necessary to continue in this business.
I thought LSD was an abused drug in that it was never meant for a person to drop and then go walking down the street.
I truly miss the genius of the music of John Lennon, as I'm sure everybody does.
I want to be on set and die hearing those words: Where's Peter?
I want to die in the saddle. I love writing, producing, acting, directing.
I was caught by a powerful public surge to hold onto their chosen heroes. I was the son of a chosen hero. I was still trying to find me.
I was counting on the fact that Hopper playing an LA speed freak would ensure that the audience would turn to my character.
I was famous from birth.
I was named Beekeeper of the Year by the Florida State Beekeeping Association.
I was rebellious, fighting the waves. I lived in the shadow of this great legend and yet everybody was telling me to be my own man.
I wasn't really aware that my father was working for quite a while. I thought it was my mother who had all the money!
I'd turned out to be a skinny little kid. I still only weighed about nine pounds when I was 15, so I didn't live up to my father's expectations. He felt embarrassed by it, so it embarrassed me too.
I'm glad I lived. There's plenty of things I've done in my life that could have killed me. I'm a very fortunate person.
I'm sitting here petting my golden lab. This place is a great release to take a vacation from everything.
I've always internalized things.
If I ever exhaust my favors in Hollywood, I'll definitely go jump around in theater again.
If I have enough ego to say I'm a writer, a director, a producer, and an actor, I should have the energy and the knowledge to write a scene for this great actor named Henry Fonda and direct him in it and have it work.
In any good traveling western, some of the characters die.
It took us a long time to find out that we had been lied to by our parents' generation. The moralities that were followed during our parents' generation were basically arbitrary. This caused a rift between the two generations, which was brought on by the beatniks.
It took us years to find out that he loved us very much, because it was so hard for him to express it. He was a good actor because he could take that repressed emotion onstage or in front of the camera and say how he felt.
It's fantastic, fun, talking to kids.
It's wonderful to me that bees have this simple, age-old thing going on.
Lennon was not very fond of me. Lennon didn't like to be around somebody else who was likely to be the center of attention and didn't like being on deck with somebody who was intellectually as hot as he was.
LSD was designed for you to look inside yourself. Quite a liberating experience if you can pull it off.
Moss Hart gave me advice. That advice was, When you step on stage the first time, speak your first words clearly. You can mumble the rest of the play, but the audience will be sure that they can hear you.
My abilities grow with each job, whether it's writing or directing. When I stop learing, I'll stop working.
My actual intake of different substances was far below what people thought it was, no matter how weird or outrageous they think I am.
My father and Duke liked to play pitch, an old card game, and they liked to get together to clean the brush up around the place and have a bonfire.
My father had other ways of communicating. My father was the most inventive person.
My slate is clean. I didn't like the fact that he died, but it didn't destroy me. All the hate, anger, and angst I'd had about him over the years was gone.
Nobody's that cool. It was just a character I made up. I was more along the lines of, Acting must be in the genes, and Who the hell is Henry Fonda?
Nothing was ever enough, even after I had the tremendous success with Easy Rider, which he was very proud of.
On several occasions as children, Jane and I were allowed to be with the grown-ups at the parties they'd have at our house, though there weren't many.
People ask me from time to time what it was like growing up with Henry Fonda as my father. I say, Ever see Fort Apache? He was like Colonel Thursday.
Remember, Alan Greenspan was a member of Ayn Rand's collective. To understand this is to understand why we are doomed with the Federal Reserve.
Right now I feel I can carry on acting until I die.
The first expectation was that I was supposed to put on weight. Then it was expected that we would lead proper lives, though there wasn't a lot of conversation about it.
The word courage - God, I love that word. Words are so important to me.
There is that backlog of talent: Henry and Jane. Considering that, considering them, this business requires incredible strength. I must not get tripped up by a comparative attitude.
There's a high threshold of rejection.
There's so many motorcycles in this town right now.
They found fault with me. I didn't understand why people would be jealous of me. But I was caught in a storm. An empty vortex.
They see me as the rebel, the man who hated the establishment, the guy who did Easy Rider and caused a lot of executives to lose their jobs. I'm sure they looked at me in all other kinds of ways too.
We've become much more realistic with our movies and plays. It's become much more serious.
When I'm working in a scene, I really know whether it's working or not.
When Jane and I spoke out, people thought, What ungrateful children those two kids are to be that nasty about their father.
You don't become the character.
Son of late actor Henry Fonda, father of Bridget Fonda, and brother of Jane Fonda.
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