I think people are willing to take more of a risk on an indie film, about character, etc...but at the same time, when I work on projects that are substantially bigger, in a way they do feel small. Even though the catering is way better and we actually have someone shooting with real film.... The budgets are bigger but the story still feels small, like an indie film.
If I'm not doing something or working on something, I literally just sit in the room and think, which I don't think is productive. I won't go outside for days.
The only thing I know that makes me feel comfortable is to know as much as I can. Not like what the shots are going to be, but knowing enough about my character that I can forget those things. And more specifically, my lines. I have to know my lines. I have to know something really well, so I can forget it when we're doing it. And there is comfort in knowing, "Okay, there's not another stone that I could have overturned."
I always think back to the original movies and to those quieter moments where Luke is out in A New Hope, and there are the two suns setting. It is the equivalent, basically, of a farm boy dying to get out of his small town and do something bigger. It's those kinds of universal themes that ground this whole thing in space.
Something I learned in the Marine Corps that I've applied to acting is, one, taking direction, and then working with a group of people to accomplish a mission and knowing your role within that team.
In the military, you learn the essence of people. You see so many examples of self-sacrifice and moral courage. In the rest of life you don't get that many opportunities to be sure of your friends.
At the end of whatever we're doing, I always feel like I want to go back and start over again because now I have a better sense of what it is. I feel that with everything. Like, if you're doing like a long run of a play and you're doing it seven shows a week, at the end of it, I want to go back and start from the beginning.