If you are fortunate enough to be part of a hit, particularly a transcendent one, all emotional ownership is transferred from you to the audience. Th… - Rob Lowe

I think it was Alfred Hitchcock who said that 90% of successful movie making is in the casting. The same is true in life. Who you are exposed to, who you choose to surround yourself with is a unique variable in all of our experience, and it is hugely important in making us who we are.

I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.

Who you are exposed to, who you choose to surround yourself with, is a unique variable in all of our experiences and it is hugely important in making us who we are. Seek out interesting characters, tough adversaries and strong mentors and your life can be rich, textured, highly entertaining and successful, like a Best Picture winner. Surround yourself with dullards, people of vanilla safety and unextraordinary ease, and you may find your life going straight to DVD.