Actor Anthony Hopkins longs for the simpler times when Hollywood types didn't overanalyze moviemaking. "I just read a book about Hollywood in the '60s ('Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock-'N'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood' by Peter Biskind)," Hopkins, 60, tells EW Online. "Moviemakers were gangsters and maniacs back then. Now everyone's too overeducated. I hear all of the talk in the film schools. I don't know what they're talking about. The fact that we're living, eating, sleeping movies -- it's lost on me."

As an example, Hopkins knocks the practice of scrutinizing individual takes on the on-set video-playback monitor -- a habit he calls "the greatest scourge of the movie industry because it destroys the relationship between actors and directors." Hopkins, who won an Academy Award for his performance in 1991's "Silence of the Lambs" and currently stars with Brad Pitt in "Meet Joe Black" (opening Friday), prefers a much simpler method of acting. "What I do is not the cure for cancer. People ask, 'How do you act?' I show up, learn my lines, and do it. It's easy." For some.