I have such bad memories, sitting in the back of a classroom, being told, you know, everybody is going to read a paragraph, and skipping ahead to my paragraph and being mortified and trying to read it enough times so that I wouldn't stutter and stammer, getting called on, even in high school.
I was the child who would leave school and take her clothes off the second I got into the house. I made my mom buy me lingerie when I was 5 years old. I was a sicko. My mother must have been mortified.
At school I was a disaster, but when I would design, I could feel a sense of pride. I've always designed, and I would literally design everything I'd see: cars, bikes, motorcycles - everything.
If you were to look back at me as a school kid you'd see a very quiet little church mouse kind of character.
I didn't even dance at my high school prom, and I have turned down so many movie roles because I didn't know how to dance.
The acting bug just seemed to stick with me. I loved going to theatre school in college and continued to train in film classes and had been auditioning for T.V. and movie roles since I was in my late teens. My career has been slow and steady, and I kind of like it that way.
I don't wish I started later, but I was never a child star. I was in school every year and had normal friends and I loved it and here I am, so I can't say that I wish I hadn't done it. I used to say, 'No, I didn't miss any of my childhood,' but it is a very adult place to be, a movie set. Like, it's a little weird.
I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Real small, like one high school and one movie theater. Well, there was a state college there, that was the only good thing about it.
I would play hooky from school and spend all day in the movie theaters. Consequently, I learned satire in all its subtle forms.
If you go to business school, and you put a product out there in the world, and it's working, the logic is to keep putting the same product out there. And I think that really bumps up against the creative process - and moviemaking, generally. And I think that our company really pushes against that.
I wrote 'Echo' a few months after moving out of my sister's apartment in Atlanta. I was 17 and just finished high school. I didn't go to prom and didn't walk the stage. I just dipped.
The first thing I learned in boxing is to not get hit. That's the art of boxing. Execute your opponent without getting hit. In sports school, we were putting our hands behind our backs and having to defend ourselves with our shoulders, by rolling, by moving round the ring, moving out feet.
In my junior high and high school days, I would just pick up a mower and go mow the neighbor's grass and make an extra 30 bucks.
I didn't pay as much attention in school as I would have liked to.
My sister taught me addition and subtraction and multiplication and division, so by the time I got to school, I knew it all, and when we'd do the times tables, I was just focused on doing it faster than anybody else. I already had the information, so it just got me to focus on excellence.
I find so often, you know, just on a very mundane level; you've got a meeting and your child's acting in a school play. You can't do both things. And it's not simply that you can't do both, but whatever you do, you're going to be neglecting something that's really important.
Voting is how we participate in a civic society - be it for president, be it for a municipal election. It's the way we teach our children - in school elections - how to be citizens, and the importance of their voice.
I grew up in Oregon, so there was always a lot of that folksy, Bob Marley stuff. There was a mural of Bob Marley on a wall at my high school.
At 11, I went to Misha's school for two summers. So when I wasn't in that school, I was taking classes at David Howard or Robert Denver's studios - kind of legendary places - and there was one summer where Alexander Godunov sort of took me under his wing; the memory's a little murky, but I felt as if I was his project for those weeks.
School was pretty good about letting me take up music and that's where I had my first musical ideas and first said, 'Yeah, I'm going to be a musician.' I just had to do a quick stop gap in the army first.
