The success of the second 'Austin Powers' caught us by surprise a little bit. We had decided not to do even a second one, unless the audience wanted it and we could do something better.
To me, the biggest surprise is that Google still functions despite the explosion in the number of sites.
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
If you apprentice yourself to the smartest people who will take you seriously, you will learn at every step. You'll learn their special language. You'll see what real people do. Your interests might surprise you. They will evolve. And you'll be well-positioned to take advantage of whatever opportunity life throws your way.
We even did a re-imagining of 'Spider-Man' that James Franco starred in that didn't make it into 'This Is The End'. That didn't make the final cut, but I wouldn't be surprised if it made the DVD.
When you have these surprise breakout films that do well, that have good performances in them, it puts a lot of pressure on the Academy to recognize those projects, so it's more of a conversation about what is greenlit.
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
What I try to do as an actor is constantly find that, find ways to risk, find opportunities to fall on my face if it's going to be worth it, and then maybe I'll surprise myself.
Generally, Hollywood makes the same stories over and over. I've never wanted to do the same thing twice. If a script doesn't surprise me in some way, I simply can't commit to the project.
'21 Jump Street' is great. I just made that, and produced it and was a writer on it. It's starring myself and Channing Tatum, and maybe some surprise guests.
If we emit massive quantities of untested chemicals into the environment, some of them are bound to end up in places that surprise us, doing things that endanger us.
I was very surprised that for a while I could only get cast as straight. It was that way for a few years.
I think that games like 'Braid' show us that the 'new kids on the block' can do some really inventive, smart things with a genre like the side-scrolling platformer that has been around for 25 years. It's proof that people can 'come up' and surprise us all the time.
The first two pictures I did, I played a young student in prep school. When I did Lifeguard, everyone was saying, You're so Southern California. It was a surprise to me.
For me, running a set and directing has been the most rewarding thing of my life and a happy surprise, because it was never really on my radar.