Brie Larson
Each step of the way, I'm learning. When I leave an interview, I learn whether I feel, 'Oh, that was nice,' or that made me feel like a little piece of me was taken.
I used to dislike it, but now I like it more and more, feeling small. I like feeling like a little speck.
Sometimes you never fully understand why you are attracted to a project until you get deeper into it.
I was home-schooled, was always very close with my mom and was very straight-laced and square. I was never the rebellious one, and I never threw hissy fits.
I love mythology and folklore, and I respect the time, money, and opportunity that a film gives to an audience. It's a chance to empathize, reflect, and learn, so I really want to understand before I sign onto a project: 'What's the potential of this thing? What are we seeing and learning? What are we empathizing to?'
I'm trying to find new ways to entertain myself because, if my whole world is doing interviews, I might as well put them in places I've wanted to see.
For me, the dumbest rule is that you can't chew gum in school.
Toni Collette has been a huge influence. She was my absolute number one idol, and then I got 'United States of Tara.' I was pinching myself. I couldn't believe the first day I was on set, and I got pages of dialogue of real stuff to do with her.
As an adult, there are technical aspects of filmmaking you understand, like having to pick up a cup on the same line every time.
I had a tough time fitting in, as I guess most kids do. I felt like school was kind of a grand opportunity to figure yourself out and to figure out what you wanted.
I still have moments when I close myself in, but I wouldn't be on the path that I am with the career that I've had if I didn't have a deep understanding of the sense of my inner freedom.
There is so much to be gained from adulthood! Feelings just become so much deeper. The feeling of sadness and loss is much deeper than when you were a kid, but the feelings of love and happiness have also so much more dimension when you get older... That is what's so hard and exciting about being a human being.
I won't do things for money. I can't.
Maybe it goes away, but this is the way I've chosen to live: I want to go down or rise up as an artist. I don't want to get swept up in lipstick or whatever the hell.
I think it is the fact that I want to quit that keeps me going. It's very complicated. But I think part of this whole exploration with every job that I do is, in terms of overcoming fear and by overcoming the fear, I feel so much more complete, and I learn something new about myself.
My identity was tangled up in the parts that I had played since I was a child. I would go through my closet and only see audition clothes: Brie looking older, Brie looking '60s, Brie looking '40s, Brie looking younger in the future.
You have to be really comfortable with yourself because people are going to tell you that you're eyes are too brown or you're this or you're that. And if you're not comfortable with yourself, you could get pretty freaked out.Collection: Eye
For me, I believe that just seeing women be strong and tough is not answering the question of what a female hero looks like. Women have their own set of skills that are worth exploring and seeing on screen.Collection: Strong
I want more awareness of humanity in this world.Collection: Humanity
We're in a different time right now, and I think we're ready to see a different type of female hero.Collection: Hero
You know how it is when you put on your best friend's shirt. You feel weird, even if everyone tells you that it looks good. You know that it isn't right.Collection: Looks
I think that fashion is very important for me and I think that it's a wonderful means of self-expression.Collection: Fashion
Surrounding myself with women of different backgrounds and on different paths and in different stages of their lives has become so valuable to me.Collection: Different
We need to have points of view from lots of different types of people. People who have different backgrounds, different parts of the world, who maybe perceive gender differently. We're in this time where we have social media, we have the ability to share so much, that I think that we need to create more space and more opportunity for people that are just outside of the typical cliched binary roles.Collection: Thinking
I think the interesting aspect of life is that you're always sort of in the middle. You're never the youngest and you're never the oldest.Collection: Thinking
When I take on a character, it's a sacrifice. There's something that you give up every time. I want to become these characters, and I want to be mysterious, but if you know too much about me, it's not going to be too much fun watching me play a character, because it's just going to be me with a mask on, instead of you believing what the mask is.Collection: Fun
I was listening to a lot of Norwegian black metal and death metal. There's a great history to Norwegian black metal. That music is very dark and violent, but it's also beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
I feel like it's too easy to just say, "We'll just change the name of this male character to a female, but have her do all the same things that a male does." I don't believe in that. I think there's something else. I think there's more to women than that.Collection: Believe
Very few interviews are a conversation. It's usually a question and I have to answer for two minutes. By the end of the day, I kind of feel gross. It's like you go to dinner with a friend and then you get home and you're like: "Ugh, I dominated that conversation too much. I wish I let them talk more." That's how it feels for me every day I do press.Collection: Home
One of the reasons I love making movies is because it's an opportunity to share with the world a different way of being or a different way of living or seeing the world. If it's something you've already seen before, if I have too many reference points for it, then it's not exciting for me to make.Collection: Opportunity
I had started acting when I was 7, and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition], but I wasn't a perfect package of one thing. I wasn't a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn't pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn't mousy enough to be the mousy girl. Then there was a TV show that Toni Collette was starring in. And when a role to play a girl who was struggling with identity came, I thought: "Oh, this is what I was supposed to do. Everything's leading up to this moment." I was 18. I was like, "This is it." I didn't get it. And I was devastated.Collection: Girl
Instruments fascinate me because they're completely awkward. When I picked up a guitar for the first time I was like, "What is this?" because it's so foreign and unknown.Collection: Guitar
The experience of making a movie, you start to see it everywhere. It's just this amazing mechanism that your brain does because it just so badly wants to be helpful and keep all the information that you need as accessible as possible.Collection: Brain
I think that usually I'm just drawn to something that's different from something that I've done previously. Whatever makes me feel something. Whatever makes me excited and connected to it.Collection: Thinking
I try to find some sort of meditative hobby to do on set, and it's different for every film. There's a lot of downtime, but I don't like reading on set because it feels like you're taking yourself out of your world, instead of being present. And then, you feel like you're not ready to do whatever you have to do.Collection: Reading
The main thing for me is just the length of time it takes to make a movie. It's at least a year of just talking about it, talking about it with yourself or your director or your other castmates or the press, so you just want to make sure it's a film that although you initially feel this pull or this drive to it, you don't really have the answers to why you're drawn to it. But it's more about not knowing the answers to certain questions but wanting to go on the journey of discovery to find the answers.Collection: Journey
There's obviously something that feels very good about being with a new filmmaker who's very excited, but I also think there's something very comforting in a director who's been around a few times. Both have their pros and cons.Collection: Thinking
I started acting in second grade - my first role was in the Thanksgiving play. I was the Indian chasing the turkey. All the other mom's encouraged my mom to get me into acting after that.Collection: Mom
It's hard when I get to the end of the movie and am held hostage and am supposed to be very upset and the funniest things I've ever heard in my life are coming out. All I can do is pretend there's something really important behind me to hide my face from it.Collection: Upset
It [the film industry] is not a glamorous industry. It's really, really hard, and you get told all the time, "You're not this, you're not that," and so you have to find a center.Collection: Film
I have always been really picky about the films that I make, because I think that there's such an incredible opportunity to bring up questions when you're making movies, and some of my favorite films bring up big questions. They are movies that, when you walk away from it, it hits you as something deeper, and it's a great, fun way to be able to bounce around some of these harder concepts in our heads.Collection: Fun
As an actor, I think you can get really bad habits, if you do the same thing, every day. You can get stuck in a rut. So, I like jumping between genres, and then taking a break and learning something new. I like feeling like I'm still learning.Collection: Thinking
I was home-schooled 'cause I wanted to be an actor. I would spend all day watching movies, trying to get through calculus.Collection: Home
Clothing totally changes my perception of how I feel about myself depending on what it is that I'm wearing.Collection: Perception
I would go into periods of depression in my life, and I would feel so alone. I felt that there was no one who understood how I felt, either on TV or in music, and writing really helped me change what I thought and how I felt about myself.Collection: Writing
I only write about stuff I know. I don't have a lot of experience with boys and stuff so I write a lot of songs about interesting and strange subjects that people wouldn't write songs about.Collection: Song
For me, the dumbest rule is that you can't chew gum in school. For some reason, chewing gum for me gets my brain going.Collection: School
I'm looking for something to laugh over. After long enough, your body just needs to keep the hydration. You can't keep crying it out.Collection: Hydration
I'm sure that there's frustration that comes with wanting to just have a normal mom. But, I don't really know if they see it as any different than any other problem you might have with a parent. I think everybody can think about one thing that their parents used to do, all the time, that would embarrass you.Collection: Mom