Q: What's a couple of your long-term goals in acting, what are two things that are really driving you to pursue this so much? Is it winning an award, maybe an Oscar, or is it working with certain people or certain types of movies? What is it that really fires you up when you do a film?
DC: Um, I think telling stories is a huge kind of motivator, and obviously stories that people can connect with, that's like the biggest thing. And, I mean, as a person, I think—I was talking to my sister about this—I'm constantly looking to surprise myself. Like, whether it is putting myself through an intensive six-week thing, whatever it is, and then having that one split second or split minute of coming out of it and thinking, 'Holy shit, I had no idea I had that in me'. And when it comes to doing films or TV or whatever, that's the culmination of when you put so much hard work into something, and it's like the Olympics, you put so much hard work for years or decades, and then you have that one moment…that moment is, I think sometimes, what I'm chasing. That's why I'm here [training in martial arts in Thailand] for a month, and sometimes it's great and sometimes it's not, but what I hope for is that when I get to work, this is an actual way to add to the box of tools. But yeah, awards…Obviously you wanna be recognized by your peers, for them to be like, 'Oh, he's good at what he does', and that's very nice…At the end of the day, that kind of fades away. My biggest thing at the end of the day is, I wanna be able to make something that people can connect to, twenty, thirty years from now, and then they'd be like, 'Oh, yeah, he really did his thing'. And that's about it.
- ‘Real Quick With Mike Swick’ #47, interview with David Castañeda (this bit starts at about the 52 minute mark)
