Esquire interview
Huntsman talks about troops from the United States withdrawing from Afghanistan:
If you can’t define a winning exit strategy for the American people, where we somehow come out ahead, then we’re wasting our money, and we’re wasting our strategic resources.It’s a tribal state, and it always will be. Whether we like it or not, whenever we withdraw from Afghanistan, whether it’s now or years from now, we’ll have an incendiary situation… Should we stay and play traffic cop? I don’t think that serves our strategic interests.
Esquire interview
Keller talks about the difficulties of being an executive editor for The New York Times:
There’s a lot of stuff they don’t teach you in the mythical editors’ school. They don’t teach you that you’re going to have to spend a lot of your life in crisis management. It’s been a fair amount of that — every kind of crisis you can imagine, starting with a crisis of morale and credibility that I inherited.
Esquire interview
Neeson talks about preparing for the file Battleship:
I’m the admiral of the fleet. But get this, I was in Belfast this summer, visiting my family, and my agent kept calling me, saying, Have you read that? Are you ready? And I said for what now? The shooting isn’t till December. And he said no, no, no. It’s Sep-tember. They need you this coming Wednesday! I’d completely let it slip my mind.
Esquire interview
Shadyac talks about how suffering a concussion in a bike accident changed his outlook on life:
I began to wake up to principles. Nature is an incredible cooperative. When things operate outside of that cooperative, they die off. It’s a very simple rule that nature operates under. When I applied that rule to my own life and saw that I was operating outside of what I think is natural, I wanted to reconsider that.
Esquire interview
Ailes talks about having liberal voices on Fox News Network:
Tell me who you want to see on the left and I’ll hire them. If you give me a big name that’s out there, that’s floating around and wants work, I’d be happy to hire them. We have Ed Rendell, I mean he was the head of the Democratic party. He’s on twice a week. You can’t get any bigger than that. I go for people who will get ratings, but I’d be happy to put a bigger name Democrat on if you’ve got one. Now that probably surprises you and won’t get into the story, but it’s true. I want people who have marquee value.
Esquire interview
Adria talks about how he deals with positive and negative reactions to his cooking:
Why did one person like it but the other person didn’t? One thought it was too much and the other thought it was not enough. It took me fifteen years to understand. Every person is a world. It’s better not to ask. Otherwise, you’re going to end up at the psychoanalyst.
Esquire interview
Coudreaut talks about making a good hamburger:
One thing you could think about is cooking your burger from frozen rather than from raw. I make the patties ahead of time, wrap them individually, and keep them in my freezer, so when my kids come home I can make them a good burger. Another important thing is, always season the burger. Salt and pepper. I think that’s something that people just forget to do. And make sure that you’ve got good fresh bread — a good Kaiser roll, or a pretzel roll, something like that.
Esquire interview
Shook discusses his Los Angeles restaurant Animal:
I don’t know. Basically, first, the product there is amazing. We’re in Southern California. We have the best produce in the world. We buy a certain level of meat product. We use Diamond Ranch, a conglomerate of family-run farms, and a lot of the reason we buy from them is supply and demand. When you’re using twenty pounds of pig ears every other day, that’s a lot of pigs. You figure six ears per pound. That’s three pigs.
Esquire interview
DiCaprio gives his thoughts on the fame he attained after starring in the movie Titanic:
It wasn’t the era of penetrating Internet paparazzi that we have now. But my name wasn’t me anymore. I was sort of this thing. Kate felt it, too. But a lot of the attention was on me because of the teenage girls who repeatedly went to see the movie. I had the blond hair, and I was Jack Dawson, this heroic figure. So I set up everything in my personal life to rebel against that image in order to strip it down. I had a lot of fun stripping it down. But ultimately, that knocked me a few rungs down the ladder.
Esquire interview
Torv talks about her role as Nariko in the video game Heavenly Sword:
But the character I play in Heavenly Sword, Nariko, is ultimately protecting her family and this runaway girl. It’s a beautiful game. It’s beyond a video game. The landscape is to protect and to care. My friend is working toward a world where you get an emotion out of the people who are playing it. See if you can make them cry if they couldn’t save the people who they were trying to protect. This isn’t Pac-Man.
Esquire interview
Lively speaks about a love scene she had in the movie The Town:
I have a sex scene in this film, and that’s never comfortable, she says as the knife blade bangs the plate she’s using as a cutting board. You think, Oh, that’s going to be so awkward. But this scene isn’t supposed to be a steamy one — it’s sort of tragic, because this girl is so desperately trying to keep this man interested. It’s more intimate than most sex scenes. I’m pretty much crying in it.
Esquire interview
Clinton gives his thoughts on why his proposed health care bill in 1994 didn’t get passed:
Basically, everybody who writes about this stuff today repeats the health-insurance lobby’s line from 1994. Like: The bill was long and complicated. The bill took out four hundred more pages of federal law than it put in. They say we forced a bill on Congress — untrue. I asked Congress to write the bill, and Chairman [Dan] Rostenkowski [of the House Ways and Means Committee] demanded that Hillary send him a bill — a complete bill. He said, “I won’t take it up if you don’t. We don’t know enough about it, the interest groups will eat us alive, we’ll modify your bill, but you’ve gotta send us a whole bill.” It was the demand of the most important committee in the House of Representatives.
Esquire interview
Franklin gives his thoughts on the drug war in the United States:
The prison population is off the hook in this country, Franklin says. In 1993, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, the incarceration of black males was 870 per 100,000. In 2004 in the U.S., for every 100,000 people we are sending 4,919 black males to prison. And the majority of those are for nonviolent drug offenses. But we’d rather send people to prison than give them information and treatment.
Esquire interview
Roth talks about his role as Sergeant Donny Donowitz in the movie Inglourious Basterds:
The Basterds kind of keep him in reserve, so that when they’re interrogating the Germans, they’re like, You’d better tell us where so-and-so is hiding, or we’re bringing out the Bear Jew. The idea’s that when you hear the Bear Jew, you think it’s going to be some 300-pound, huge 6-foot-7 muscle guy, and Quentin said he wants people to go, ‘That’s the Bear Jew? Eli?
Esquire interview
Novak discusses his role in the movie Inglorious Basterds:
Private First Class Smithson Utivitch. He probably came from a family that was trying to assimilate into the Waspy mainstream by naming their kid Smithson, and the war was his chance to reclaim being Jewish. I don’t know if you’ll see that onscreen, but that’s where I’m coming from when I’m paying really close attention to Brad Pitt.
Esquire interview
Burhard gives his thoughts about the set of the movie Inglorious Basterds:
We were always staying in character. Eli Roth, who plays our sergeant, had instructions to stay on top of us. The shoot was on such a tight schedule, and it was just about staying really concentrated and in character. We were Basterds 24/7. That was our life.
Esquire interview
Doom talks about his role in the movie Inglorious Basterds:
Private First Class Omar Ulmer. I didn’t know I was going to be in the movie until two weeks before we started filming. I’ve known Quentin for a long time, and he called me and was like, I want you to come to Berlin and be a Basterd. I was like, All right. I’ve been preparing for this role my whole life.
Esquire interview
Rust discusses his role as Private First Class Andy Kagan in the movie Inglorious Basterds:
He’s a farm boy from Illinois, hungry for some action, but he wasn’t in the original script. By the time we met and hit it off, Quentin had already filled the other roles, so he created the part for me.
Esquire interview
Eastwood talks about his relationship with his children:
I have children by other women. I gotta give Dina the credit for bringing everyone together. She never had the ego thing of the second wife. The natural instinct might have been to kill off everybody else. You know, the cavewoman mentality. But she brought everybody together. She’s friendly with my first wife, friendly to former girlfriends. She went out of her way to unite everybody. She’s been extremely influential in my life.
Esquire interview
Webb talks about being a writer and serving in government at the same time:
I view myself principally as a writer, professionally. Writing is what I will always do, no matter what. This side of things [government service] I feel obligated to do from time to time. I sort of unwittingly started this two-track career.