Josh Pais

And and he said and he said, but like, why?

And I may have been the first time I really articulated it, but I just said that.

by creating different characters, even characters that are really dark or really elevated, that it's going to make the world better.

Even if someone can see a dark side in a character, and if they have that in themselves, maybe they'll be like, yeah, I have that too.

And it's also one of the powers of...

acting or watching a movie of watching theater when it's good.

the audience sees all their stories cease to exist.

Like an audience comes to a performance, hoping that the actors will engage them so much that they will leave their life and they'll enter another world.

And that that's, there's something really beautiful about, you know, about that.

And so that's, you know, I told him that and he was like,

He was like, okay, I'll pay for some acting classes, you know?

I mean, the first movie I ever did was a movie called Jackknife, and it was with Robert De Niro, who was, you know...

Especially for a young actor at that time, it was like he's... Not that he's not still, but just a god of this art form.

Right.

And I remember prior to that, I had done...

theater in little East village basements, you know, where there was hard, you know, there were maybe 12 people in the audience and the director was like, always speak loud enough so that the back row hears you.

But, you know, and there were often boilers running, you know, so we had to speak over that.

And so I got this, you know, I auditioned, I got this movie and,

And we do a rehearsal with me and De Niro in front of the whole crew, just so they can see how to light the scene.

And so he says his line to me, and then I say my line to him, like so loud so that everybody, like the people making coffee 50 feet away could hear me, you know, and then he just spoke right to me.