Matthew Modine and a Story From Prague | Big Think

Matthew Modine and a Story From Prague

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Matthew Modine recounts the most beautiful place he’s ever worked.

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Matthew Modine:

Matthew Modine is an actor who has starred in major films including Streamers, Full Metal Jacket, Married to the Mob, Pacific Heights, Any Given Sunday, and Notting Hill. His recent television work includes Showtime's hit, Weeds. And he recently wrote, directed and starred in the short film "I Think I Thought" about a man who cures himself of over-thinking. He lives in New York.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Where is the most beautiful place you’ve ever worked?rnrnModine: I think the most beautiful place, city, was Prague, you know, in the Czech Republic. Just, the people were really, really interesting and the city was so filled with history, and… I really enjoyed Prague. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in my life while filming… We weren’t filming, but I was, I had a day off and I was riding a scooter around. It was on an island called Patmos. It’s a holy island in the Greek Islands, where Saint John the Divine was supposed to have written the Book of Apocalypse, and I went off. I got off the beaten path and was driving this little Moped down a dirt road, and I found a cove where there was a farm. There was an ancient farm. It could have easily been a thousand year old farm. A little stone house with this little Greek people with fingers that were fat as potatoes. There was fig trees and sheep and donkeys. And it was a completely self-sustaining world right there that I imagine that some of those people maybe never left that spot, that they had spent their lives working the soil and taking care of their animals, picking fruit from the trees. And in that particular moment, when I arrived there, there was this cove and there were little ships where they could go out, little boats, you know, that could go out in the sea and catch fish. So you had the soil that was fertile, the fig trees, the little people, lemon trees, and then the sun was just there, setting in the West, with the water, and it was all the elements, the sky, the earth, the sun. And I sat there on the scooter, looking at this place, and I wept. I literally just with not any desire to, just started crying about how beautiful this corner of the world was, that how simple life can be and how beautiful life can be. And astonished my…. I was astonished at how complicated we make our lives.