I keep working with fairly inexperienced directors. You know, if you have a good crew, a good cameraman, you know, I know what I'm doing. If the actors know what they're doing, we can all pull together, and it works.
So now what happens is the cameras follow me around and capture exactly what I've been doing since I was a boy. Only now we have a team of, you know, like 73 of us, and it's gone beyond that.
I'm not the new Cameron Diaz. I'm not the new Keira Knightley, either. I don't know where these ideas come from. I'd rather be thought of as the one and only Laura Haddock. I'll happily settle for that.
When I was still back in Cameroon, because I didn't know English, I used to listen to French rap all the time and then a little bit of American hip-hop. And then, when I got to the States, that's when I really got into all those guys - Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, all those guys.
I go back to Africa every year. I have a home there. You know, my grandfather lives back there in Cameroon.
We try to bring in the best players for Cameroon: not just best in terms of talent but those who are motivated and who know what it means to play for this nation.
I don't know how it plays in San Francisco. But I can tell you I came out, during a reelection campaign, in Indiana, while Mike Pence was the governor. And I wound up winning reelection by 80 percent.
I know how to run a nationally paced campaign.
I've worked on enough campaigns to know that the most aggrieved candidate rarely emerges victorious.
I feel like movies, if there's any kind of budget whatsoever, there's so much sitting, and I really like to work. Otherwise my blood sugar just drops, you know, six hours sitting in a camper.
I'm a Hollywood kid, and I know that there are only so many stories. Only so many tales around the campfire that we have to tell. Then we have to regurgitate them. Our grandparents' movies were all remakes of silent films - we forget that, but it's true.
I always thought of myself as more American than Americans when I was living in Germany, because I always had this attitude of can-do, and if you're successful, you can show it, which is a very un-German thing, you know.
I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.
My first movie was this independent that I did on the Erie Canal in 1995, called Erie, that I don't know if you could even get, actually with Felicity Huffman. And then from that I did this film that was eventually called The Broken Giant later that fall. And then I kind of started getting into doing pilots.
I want you to know what I have told Australia's Parliament in Canberra - what I told General Petraeus in Kabul - what I told President Obama in the Oval Office this week. Australia will stand firm with our ally the United States.
'The X-Files,' as I recall, we didn't know really what we were until the middle of the first year. You know, so if we'd been cancelled, you get cancelled before you mature into what it is you can actually be, which is too bad.
I know it's not particularly tech-savvy of me to suggest a camera that doesn't have a touchscreen, but I think when it comes to candid shots of nights out with friends, there's nothing better than a disposable camera.
Now you know those trick candles that you blow out and a couple of seconds.
I really have a distaste for poets who announce themselves at 50 yards; you know, here he comes, you know, with the beret and the cane and the cape and the whatever - whatever mishegas is part of the outfit there.
My feeling is that labels are for canned food... I am what I am - and I know what I am.
