Quotes from David Morse

I've done scenes in films that I felt like the performance was better in certain takes, but they couldn't use them because it didn't match what the person was doing when they came around and the camera was on them.

At 17, I became a member of the Boston Repertory Theatre. I had an opportunity pretty quickly and performed with the theater for six years.

Part of the problem when I was doing 'How I Learned to Drive' is I would see my kids one night a week for six months, and that was just too hard. We moved to Philadelphia after we lost our house in the earthquake, the '94 Northridge earthquake.

Just in terms of when I got the script, the character I probably liked the least was Big Foster. Because even though he was central to the story and to that world, he was really written to be kind of a brute, a pig, a completely black-and-white bad guy.

By the time I could have played football, I was already into acting and that's what I wanted to do.

You get to the middle of a take that's going really well and the camera will run out of film. They have to stop you, apologize and then you've got to get things going all over again.

With Sean Penn, he wants to be surprised. He doesn't necessarily want what he's written, although we'll do what he's written. He likes the danger of acting.

I don't care about the money. I just need, as an actor, to do as many different things that I can to make me feel good about myself.

I don't like talking about myself. I'm not really interested in myself. One of the good things about being a supporting actor is that you get to talk about other people.

In my first film, I was a basketball player. Like every good actor, I lied when they asked me if I could play.

Home wasn't a pleasant place to live, growing up.

I'm acting for the pleasure of it.

'Outsiders,' I guess, is sort of dark, but I don't really think of it as dark. The world up there on that mountain, it had the potential to have a lot of fun as well as a lot of drama, these guys raiding the town in their ATVs with their tattoos. It seemed like something different.

I was a teenager and it was tough years for me. Being able to bring myself into a character and live in somebody else's world was so important for me emotionally. I couldn't express things well in my normal life. I was so overwhelmed by my emotions.

In independent film you tend to have stories that involve more of a community, and the smaller characters are important to the story.

The relationship with producers has always, in my experience, been, uhhh - tense. Challenging. But the actors and crew become like family. You're there all those hours - more than on a movie. You come to depend on each other.

I want to talk about my very first play, when I was in eighth grade. One day, my English teacher, Mrs. Baker, announced that we were going to read 'On Borrowed Time' out loud in class. I was a mediocre student; I was terrified that she was going to call on me, so I hid my head.

In high school, I tried out for every sport there was. But none of them would have me. When I was a freshman, someone asked me to go audition for a play with them. I got in and didn't want to do anything else for the next four years.

I've always tried to not let movie, television or theatre be all that my life is about. I've always tried to get involved in the community or my family now I have kids.

With repertory, you had to play all these different characters. The range of roles is really what I fell in love with, every night getting to become somebody different. That was my idea of acting, getting to be part of the company and a family.

Because I'd only done theater, that's really what I thought most of my life would be. I always figured that movies would be a part of it at some point. I didn't know how or when.

I've had the chance to work with Christopher Plummer, one of the great stage and film actors, a couple of times, including on 'Prototype,' the first TV movie I ever did. It was science fiction in the Ray Bradbury sense, written by the famous team who created Columbo, Levinson, and Link.

I will be always grateful to NBC.

One year, I went to Cannes with the film 'The Indian Runner' that Sean Penn directed. Everyone else in the film was all the same height, and on the red carpet, when they were taking photos, none of them would stand next to me, and I totally got it.