I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!
I'm big and a lot of the stars are smaller so if you're big and mean looking, you play bad guys. After Blade Runner, I was the meanest guy in Hollywood.
I never play a villain that I don't have something I can either do or say so the audience sees there is something redeemable about them. In other words, I don't want to do evil for evil's sake. I don't want to do Jason slasher movies. There's no point in that.
Westerns was why I got into the business. I grew up on a small farm in California and all I ever wanted to do was to play gangsters and cowboys in movies.
And when an architect has designed a house with large windows, which is a necessity today in order to pull the daylight into these very deep houses, then curtains come to play a big role in architecture.
Real-life people are often the hardest to play, people that you recreate who have actually lived, because you have to live up to people's knowledge of those characters.
