The first movie that really moved me probably was Almost Famous.
The first movie experience I had was a film I watched in the Philippines.
It was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
That was my first movie.
That's why I'm always grateful to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and Harrison Ford.
It's called Lollipops and Roses.
It is about this young love, you know, this teen love.
And I was a kid and yeah.
It was my first cinematic experience.
It felt very magical to me.
It was not until
when we premiered the movie at Mann's Chinese Theatre,
and the first time I saw myself up on the screen,
that's when I fell in love with acting and
that was the day that I knew I wanted to be an actor for the rest of my life.
And the first time
I thought cinema was bigger than myself was when I was acting with someone.
And it's happened over and over again where someone's so honest in a scene.
I'm like, “That's why we do this.”
And I'm usually on the other side of the camera just watching them.
And then it's my turn. I'm like, “I don't know what I'm doing.”
I think Once Upon a Time in America
and Blade Runner were two films that I think I was getting
into the adolescence and really were emotionally and visually very powerful for me.
In terms that I became to consider
something that I could get into that. You know, always films has get me
since I was a kid.
But in the particular direction of
become part of that, I think those two films can be important.
It was a movie called Benji.
It was about a dog that saved a little kid from being kidnapped.
Like to this day, I remember how I felt.
It was the first time I ever cried in the theatre and realising the power of film,
that something that wasn't real could make me feel that deeply.
You know, before Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
I was invited to like a tastemaker
screening of Honey Boy that Alma Har'el directed.
And I remember sitting in that small, intimate theatre and just
feeling completely moved by that movie.
And I had already found out that I was going to be filming Everything Everywhere.
But it was like the first movie that I got to really see
knowing I was about to make one.
And I remember just thinking in that movie theatre,
movies change lives. And I'm so excited
and I've really fallen deeply in love with cinema.
My dad is a sailor or a hobbyist,
and every summer we would go on a sailing trip
instead of a vacation on a pretty small boat.
And we were always in these like very exotic locations, but
we were not at the actual, like, luxury resort on the beach in Saint Martin.
We were anchored out at sea in eyeshot of like people having a great time.
And I hated it.
We had a small television on board with a VHS player,
and he had rented three movies from Blockbuster or whatever.
One was 8½,
the original Westworld and The Witches of Eastwick,
all movies that I still love today.
But I watched them so many times because I was seasick
and mad that we were on this vacation and trapped in a very small sailboat
with my family that I watched them over and over and over again.
And I remember it being the first time I thought,
“Oh! That was--” I was already into art.
But “Oh, that's an artistic form.
And there's kind of an author of this thing
and it's kind of an expression, a personal expression.”
And that was when I got into movies.
As an escape from my family.
I remember when I was a kid and I saw The Chronicles of Narnia with my grandma.
And I walked out of the theatre and there were storm clouds coming.
And I thought that I, like had the power to talk to the storm clouds.
So I remember like secretly, like doing my fingers like this
and thinking that I was like telling them to come closer.
And then it rained and I was like, “I am a magic person!”
I don't remember when cinema would have a deep impact on my life.
I do remember my first moment in a movie.
I had to say, “Flowers for Mrs. Salmon!”
That was my line.
And I remember I got £150 for it
and it was in a Joan Collins movie called The Bitch.
I have a better memory of the first play that I saw.
And... because we were taken to
pantomimes
when we were kids, you know.
And I remember there's
a pantomime called Give a Dog a Bone, and the main character was a dog.
And I forget what the plot was, but I kept trying to help him
solve the plot from the audience.
He was trying to find something, and whatever it was was in Paddington.
And I would keep yelling,
“It's in Paddington Station!” from the audience.
And eventually he stopped the show
and went, “I know, little boy, but I'm not supposed to find it till act 3.”