I have a life and do a lot of things, and so far my work has been my life. If I was a painter no one would question me about my age. I'm an artist, I hate saying that.
I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.
Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.
I wanted to be a baseball player, naturally, but I wasn't good enough. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I just had a kind of energy, I was a fairly happy kid.
It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me.
When I was doing 'Scarface,' I remember being in love at that time. One of the few times in my life. And I was so glad it was at that time. I would come home and she would tell me about her life that day and all her problems and I remember saying to her, look, you really got me through this picture because I would shed everything when I came home.
There are people whose sense of reality is very strong, who have a sense of honesty. Lee Strasberg is like that, my grandfather was like that. These are the kinds of men I've had close relationships with.
When you perform with a live audience, the audience comes back to you, so that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It's an extraordinary thing. It's wild turf up there.
We were doing Scarface many years ago...and I remember having my coffee and looking at the beach, the surf, and I saw a hundred people looking out into the ocean. I thought, what's going on? Did some whale get washed up to shore? So I stood up on the table to see what it was, and it was the director, Brian De Palma, standing there alone by the surf and they were all waiting for him. And I never forgot that because it represented to me what a director is, what a director does.
"To be or not to be is" [by William Shakespeare] beyond anything I can comprehend. I understand it on a superficial level, but the depth of it just boggles my mind. I think it's probably the greatest of all speeches ever written.