Success is not something I've wrapped my brain around. If people go to those movies then yes that's true big-time success. If not it's much ado about nothing.

Life is short. I'm 47 years old. I've got 10 years to go where I can be the best I can be. I want those 10 years to be precious not like before cranking two or three movies a year. I've made a ton of movies in my life but so what?

I did try to get a few of those teen high-school movies but they just didn't like me. I guess I wasn't a certain type.

I don't think Hollywood was trying to do anything with me. In fact they lost interest pretty quick. I think I got lucky briefly in the '90s and it just so happened that those movies were the opportunities that came my way. Then it just kind of stopped.

James Cagney Steve McQueen I loved all those guys. I grew up loving the movies but had no desire to be in them.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class age gender culture.

The movies I made when I was 14 or 15 I have a hard time looking at those. Those were the awkward years. I don't know if anybody can look at something they did when they were 14 and not wince.

I kind of realize that I have a tendency to choose the kind of films I watched when I was a kid and would go home and pretend with my friends that we were in those movies after we saw them.

I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O'Neal Richard Roundtree Jim Brown Pam Grier. For the first time I saw 'The Negro' get one over on 'The Man.'

If you're not a real chameleon of an actor and if you're not one of those guys who can really shape-change themselves all the time one of the ways to keep pushing yourself and keep changing is to be in different kinds of movies.