I've been fortunate to get involved with 'Short Term 12.' I was just a young teenager on the Internet, clicking on anything that had the word 'actor' in it. One day, someone called me in for a movie audition.
Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!
For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn't the art of photography but I don't agree.
The photographers are always around. Wherever I go, they start clicking incessantly. I am always like, 'At least give me a heads-up, as, many times, I look so disheveled. What will people think?'
I don't really like talking too much about myself, but I have this feeling that it's all clicking for me. It's all coming together.
I thought nothing would ever happen for me. My whole life had been geared toward being a singer, and it wasn't clicking.
Just the life of doing what I do, being in the public eye, it's a stressful environment... You feel strange, self-aware, very foolish. Your third eye clicks on, just to try to maintain a healthy sense of perspective, and you think, 'What am I doing here? I'm just making a movie, and people want all these things from me.'
Magic to me is you make a movie and it's all great and it clicks, and at the end of the day you feel like you're having an experience that is positive and that you're learning from.
Backstage, I get sleepy, and want to curl up and snooze. I never get nervous, whatever the event. I feel quite detached until I walk on stage, and then some gear inside me clicks and off I go like a wind up doll.
When I first joined with Murphy, I had to make a character change. I wasn't confident in myself about that at all, but I remember my mom telling me that once something clicks with me... I had to... come in and kick the door down and let everyone know who I am.
A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.
Clients say, 'What's your strategy,' and I say, 'Ask me what I believe first.' That's a far more enduring answer.
If I've got a problem with one of my clients that needs to get solved, guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to call them up, and I'm going to say, 'Hey, here's what's going on. This is the situation. This thing went sideways. I didn't expect it. Now it's going to take me some more time to get you what you need.' But I'm going to do that upfront.
I refuse for any person or organized group to dictate to me what God is. That is really the height of insufferable hubris. I believe in just immediately putting to death or just putting over the cliff people who assume they know about God.
With acting, you have to become someone else. That's the fun part of it for me - to step outside of yourself and become a character. I guess being Jimmy Cliff is a little bit of a character, too.
If we are going to list guitar influences, the biggest one by far is Wes Montgomery. Also, Gary Burton was obviously huge for me in a number of ways. But beyond that, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard.
My father was a jazz tenor sax player. He played in a lot of big bands. So I had that sound around me all the time. The first record that really caught my ear was Clifford Brown's 'Brownie Eyes.' I grew up listening to John Coltrane and Illinois Jacquet. This is where I come from... I love improvisational music.
For me, the key is years of the blessed filmmakers I've worked with giving me permission to be bold and jump off cliffs and to be boundaryless. I would put David Lynch at the top of that list.
Musically, I always allow myself to jump off of cliffs. At least that's what it feels like to me. Whether that's what it actually sounds like might depend on what the listener brings to the songs.
'The Haunted Man' is about communication barriers between men and women, and in that song it's a woman's wait for her husband to come back from war. The vision for me was of a group of men and women on the opposite sides of two cliffs, trying to move or sing to each other and communicate, but they're kind of misfiring.
