Happy Birthday: Paul Schneider

Paul Schneider

Born: March 16, 1976 in Asheville, North Carolina, USA

I come from a really lovely, really smart family where the only stress was money and employment. It wasn’t violence, it wasn’t drink – it was money. I was a sensitive, runty, rednecky kid, and I absorbed my parents, stress about that. Now I find myself living in the epicenter of money, trying to define myself against it. I’m having a nice little swing here, but even if they come at me with a big paycheck – and they haven’t, believe me – it won’t fill the void that’ll be created in me if I have to go out and lie to guys like you about loving a movie I’m in that I actually can’t stand. That’s gotta chip away at you.

After we did All the Real Girls (2003), some guy asked me how I was going to go to Hollywood and hang on to my indie values. “Indie values”? There’s like 18 things wrong with that phrase, but I understood what he meant. If your value system is external to you, then yeah, it can be hard to hold on to. Is it hard to hold on to this glass of water through a typhoon? It absolutely is. But if your value system is in you, like lungs, like blood..

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