Cliff Curtis

CLIFF QUOTES AND LINKS

QUOTES

He was originally offered a bad-guy role in Runaway Jury, which meant hitting lovely actress Rachel Weisz - "I said passssss" - but was finally cast as Frank". New

"I put a thing out to my [Hollywood] agent saying, 'Let's try a year where I don't play a terrorist or drug dealer, where I don't kill anybody, and see what happens'."

"It would be my ideal world if I could do two like that [Whale Rider and Spooked] a year here - and finally get a job with Peter Jackson, but not playing an orc necessarily. If I could do that, I would be a very happy man."

"I'm very similar but different from Jennifer Lopez and I would never be attracted to someone like Ben Affleck."

"I'm not a celebrity. I don't have a public following, people don't go to see Cliff Curtis movies"

"Trying to convince people that a movie about some indigenous community on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand is going to have international appeal when there are no American movie stars riding into the plot and saving them from themselves is a hard sell...It took years to convince producers and funding bodies back home that our stories were relevant, anyway."

'Let's do the whole bloody thing differently'."

On the Whale Rider I've been waiting for this film for a long time. It's fun to go off and put on a disguise and pretend to be someone else, but to be able to get back to myself and my culture, that was just more than really nice, y'know--it was vital.

Right--they'd take the brains out, the eyes out, preserve the whole head. Y'know, I feel like film is really legitimate in that it is sort of a by-product--rather than the product itself--of storytelling in the traditional sense. I think that sitting down and telling one another stories is the primogenitor of culture and society in the sense that you describe it, that film can be an offshoot of that but it isn't the ends of it, if you know what I mean. Having said that, when you call on your own lives to understand lives lived in different cultures; film, maybe better than television or even books which often suffer from the translation, provide a mainline into that power of the oral tradition.

--Maori are so often just used as a backdrop, or a "blackdrop,"

"I get concerned about people who want to be actors,"

"Maybe when I'm in my 70s, I'll get a Ph.D. and become an economist philosopher,"

if you're a Maori actor and someone comes to you with a part in the adaptation of The Whale Rider, mate, you go.

"That's my foot over there next to Dustin Hoffman as he walks past and talks to Gene Hackman."

“Plus,” he adds with a smile, “maybe I’m just not good-looking enough, who the hell knows. Maybe if I was Brad Pitt with a tan, I’d have a shot at it.”

“because people want to see something different ... something that has a story, God forbid.”