Oscar Isaac

“A movie set is like a petri dish for neuroses, you know? It's just, like, egos and weird personalities and, more than anything, fear.”

“Humans are mutants, everything's a mutant - things that evolve.”

“I've done movies I'm very proud of, but there's always a sense of: 'Come see this shiny new car!' The question I hate the most is: 'Why should people see it?'”

“I really just like characters who you don't know where they stand for a long while. It's like people. You hang out with them for 10 years, and then all of a sudden they do something, and you...”

“I think it's the director's prerogative, not the studio's, to go back and reinvent a movie.”

“I think for some reason we're conditioned in movies that the protagonist must be heroic or redeemable in some way, whereas in theater, that's not a necessary.”

“Anybody who dedicates himself to exploring the human condition, there's always a detached eye that's watching. In any situation, a little part of me is observing it, to see if there are any...”

“There's very few geniuses that come and revolutionize everything. For the rest of us that want to be artists and have something to say, it's a lot of work and a lot of luck.”

“A personal game-changer was when Ridley Scott cast me as King John, the King of England, for 'Robin Hood.'”

“I started playing guitar at, like, 12 or 13 and just rock bands mostly. I had a punk rock band and hard core bands and all that.”

“The self-made man that some people believe is a myth? It could be, because you do it on the backs of other people.”

“For me, with a character, you start with the shoes.”

“My dad always played a lot of music, so I heard him playing all the time, and then I decided that I wanted to learn to play guitar, so I got an acoustic and started taking lessons. I wanted...”

“I was interested in the war part of 'Star Wars,' so I started reading about what it's like to go to war, what that does to you psychically, about the adrenaline and the rush.”

“If you can find a way that your principles are actually the strategically smartest thing to do, you've kind of figured it out.”

“With Shakespeare, there's no subtext; you're speaking exactly what you're thinking constantly.”

“'Mojave' is a very wild, throwback film with these two dudes going after each other.”

“I had a great conversation with Tom Waits, of all people.”

“I always like teaser trailers because they don't give too much away, you know? They give just a flavor of what the thing is.”