“There are some people who suffer from this ‘[Auschwitz] disease’ for life, simply because of the experience they have gone through. Another group simply doesn’t talk about it. And a third group of people have learned to come to terms with these events. I’m a writer, so I don’t belong to any one of these three categories. I view my experience as being raw material and I process it in the process of writing. And as I go along, I get rid of this experience. You know, this is how I go on and on and on and on, until I reach a stage, as a writer, where I will have run out of raw material. Then it’s time to die.” https://www.netribution.co.uk/people/writer/nobel-prize-winner-imre-kertesz-fateless

“I was teaching a martial arts class and a couple of guys showed up in my class. They were talking about my team, Mannheim, and because of the way they were dressed and because they were talking about my team, I immediately knew they were hooligans, they were in a firm. Being 15 and having this whole urban myth about hooligans, I was like, ‘You got to take me to a game. I want to stand with you guys.’ They were like ‘No, no, no. No girls allowed.’ I said: ‘You have to take me because after all I’m teaching you martial arts here, so you can’t really convince me that I can’t take care of myself.’ So, in the end, to the guys and in general, I was like the little sister. One they could accept. I wasn’t necessarily a girl’s girl. They took me and for two years it became somewhat of a family for me. Everything I portrayed in the film was really what I saw. Like I thought it was really cool and really fun. I thought it was their way of choosing an extreme sport, they were just adrenalin junkies, it was alright; they didn’t hurt anybody that wasn’t in the same game. They didn’t attack families. They basically were 30 guys running against 30 guys from another team who wanted to do the same thing. I thought, ‘What’s the big fuss? Why can’t they just let them do what they want to do? They’re just a bunch of boys wanting to get into fisticuffs.’ So at first you think it’s very cool and you see a certain attraction about it, and then you start noticing what happens when somebody does break the rule, you know? You notice that even though they have this unspoken law of don’t kick anybody when he’s down, there will always be somebody who breaks it. You just cannot rely on a bunch of guys all following these rules. Even in a boxing fight you have a referee because somebody will always go low.” https://www.netribution.co.uk/people/filmmaker/lexi-alexander-up-green-street-with-the-pack

“I’ve never seen poverty on that level. A million people living in a very small space with no running water, no sanitation, no electricity, there’s a very high level of disease, HIV, and yet there’s that scene in the movie where the children come running up to you and they say, ‘How are you?’ They welcome you. I remember coming back and saying this to my sister and saying they’ve got such – I mean the kids have got nothing, they’ve got no toys, literally no toys, so they make footballs from plastic bags scrunched together and they just wrap string around it, and they kick it around, or they take a piece of string with a button on the end and they pull it as if it’s a dog. Toddlers of three or four are already carrying their siblings on their back. And yet their spirit is so welcoming and there’s a life going on. There’s little cafes and they’re barbecuing meat. There’s a life. Anyway, I came back and I said this to my sister and she was like, ‘You’re being so sentimental. You can’t say that. You’re a wealthy white person. How can you go there and say that?’ They said to me, ‘Where you come from, do children welcome strangers?’ and I said, ‘Where I come from children are told not to speak to strangers.’ We live in a different culture but you do ask a question whether with material wealth there can be spiritual poverty and vice versa. It’s a dangerous territory, though, isn’t it?” Rachel Weisz to Stephen Applebaum in 2006

“I had a very difficult time. I actually quit at least 4 or 5 times. I couldn’t get a job. I had done 30 plays in Los Angeles and I couldn’t get a job. I was getting little jobs here and there, but no one was really recognising what I thought I had. I thought, ‘I’ve done all this work, why isn’t it paying off?’ That really starts to hurt your self-image; and I already had a questionable self-image coming into the game. I wasn’t like the best candidate to become an actor. I was really insecure and I didn’t particularly like myself very much.” What did your mother say to make you not give up? It’s down to her, I believe, that you carried on? She’d never told me to do anything before and she said, ‘I’ve let you do everything. I’ve tried to let you make all your own choices in your life but goddamit, Mark, I’m not going to let you do it.’ I wanted to go back to Wisconsin and work with my father doing construction painting. She said, ‘Goddamit, I won’t let you do it. If you give up, you’ll never forgive yourself.’ She called my dad and she basically said she’d never talk to him again if he let me come up there. It was a pretty powerful moment for me. I woke up.

Michael White: With Chuck and Buck I do think one of the biggest taboos, at least in America, is still men relating with other men in an honest, vulnerable way. It’s something you rarely see in anything, and I just find it amusing. It’s not keeping pace with the reality of life. Men, in this day and age, are expressing their more vulnerable side. I don’t live the life of an action hero, so, in terms of my own life, those movies don’t really speak to me other than as wish-fulfillment fantasy. Stephen Applebaum: I’ve been writing about Fight Club, and that seems to me a very old way of looking at male relationships: men relating through violence. White: Fight Club is a perfect example of what the media, that it’s more acceptable to show two guys wailing on each other as a way of connecting, because then it has all the undercurrent of homoeroticism but, OK, in the end you’re both punching bags.

“When it came to my turn they started all this technical stuff and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m your man because I’m a dunce at a lot of these things’. “So there was a shocked silence and they said, ‘How do you expect to get on?’ I said, ‘Well I’m very fond of painting, and I also watch the light’. I had formed a habit, oddly enough, of watching the light in a room. “Anyway, they said, ‘Which side of the face does Rembrandt light?’ I said ‘This side,’ which was a guess, really. ‘And for etching, of course, it would be reversed’. That was another bluff. But the next day they told me I had been chosen.”

So where did it all start? I can’t remember where it started. When I was very young I was always grabbing all my friends from down the street and making them put on plays with me. But I never, ever, ever, in my wildest dreams, thought that I could be an actor because I come from a working-class family.” What do your parents do? My dad’s a police officer and my mum’s a secretary. We’re a kind of two-up, two-down, very normal suburban household. I went to a normal secondary school. Other people do those jobs, you know? I forgot about it, kind of grew out of it, went to school and I had two brilliant drama teachers and that was it. They gave me plays to read and I just kind of felt that that was it for me. It wasn’t like, this is what I want to do but it was the only thing that pushed my buttons and I was good at it. That was when I was at secondary school.

“I think if you put people, actors for instance, under duress, something suddenly happens: you get past acting. Kubrick did that when he was making The Shining. I had dinner with Jack Nicholson and he said, ‘He did 140 takes. It took two days to do one shot. It was just exhausting.” Later I spoke to […]

Would a film like The Devils be hard to make now? It would be impossible. No one would finance such a film, I would imagine. Hasn’t the British Film Industry improved? Well I’m not so mad on the British film industry. It seems to just produce one or two gems and then tons of mediocrity. I mean I saw, there was one the other day of people painting electric pylons. Oh Among Giants? Is that what it was called? I thought it was called Men Painting Pylons. And obviously it was so bad that they were desperate. Do you know what they did? They did long shots of them painting these pylons and over it they put a male voice chorus singing a Spiritual as though these guys from Newcastle would be singing “Nobody has known the trouble I’ve seen”. You know? All this crap.