Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I remember when I was 26. My father died when I was young and my mother didn't have a lot of money, so I thought, 'I want to own a flat by the time I'm 26.' So I worked towards that, literally trying to scrimp and save. But sometimes those plans don't go as you expect.
When my husband turned 40, I was obsessed. 'Has he had his medical checkup?' He needed to go to the doctor; he needed to go to the dentist. Any little cough, I was really on him. Then he turned 40, and I thought, 'Maybe that's why I've been so obsessed with his health!'
The more you do it, the more you learn to concentrate, as a child does, incredibly intensively and then you sort of have to relax. I remember the first film I did, the lead actor would in between scenes be reading a newspaper or sleeping and I'd think, 'How can you do that?'
When you are proud of something you have done, and you have made a film you feel has merit, and it's found an audience and is critically well received, that's a pretty pleasurable place to be. I mean, you don't want it gathering dust at the bottom of someone's DVD collection.
We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.
People talk about the golden age of Hollywood because of how women were lit then. You could be Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and work well into your 50s, because you were lit and made into a goddess. Now, with everything being sort of gritty, women have this sense of their use-by date.
I could do a thousand films that are easy for me to do-that's if I don't fall in the next year, because everyone's about to fall. What's so funny is you look at all us young guys and we're already thinking, Well, I'm going to branch out into directing, and it's all going to be this and that.
There's plenty of girlfriend roles out there. They've come my way, and many people have turned them down, and I think, "Oh maybe I could do something with this." It's interesting when you get those roles, which seem like nothing on the page, and you kind of subvert them. It's hard to say no.
I have the embarrassing thing where often if you're watching a film, you kind of go through the emotions and the thought stages that your character went through, but you sort of do it with Tourette's. So I end up often crying when I'm crying, and looking angry when I'm looking angry, so it's pretty ugly.
We've enshrined the purity, sanctity, value, and importance of bringing children into the world, yet we don't discuss death. There used to be an enshrined period where mourning was a necessary part of going through the process of grieving; death wasn't considered morbid or antisocial. But that's totally gone.
I have a very healthy relationship to my work, and I find that if a scene is working, no matter how intense it is, you have the catharsis on screen, and you can let it go. I think it's, if at the end of the day you feel like you haven't cracked it, that's when you go home and it's more difficult to switch off.
I think part of the disappointing failure of the political process in America today is that it's asking us to forget countries' historic connections to other countries, or to the laws that have been made. They're willfully asking people to forget their country's history, and focus only on the present. It's bizarre.
What I find interesting is this ricochet effect, that the audience perceives the work and then does something with it, throws it back to the world, and there's an ongoing interaction between work and audience, which doesn't belong to the artist anymore - from the moment you release it, it doesn't belong to anybody.
The first thing is to accept that theater is an unknown. If you go to a concert, you know the music. If you go to an art show, you can literally see the art on your phone before you see it in person. But with theater, often times people aren't prepared to take risks, even though that's exactly what's great about it.
I suppose the more established one gets, you have what's called a reputation, and so you want to protect that and preserve that. And I think the bravery really comes in one's mid career where you then are constantly trying to move beyond that and move past that, because those so-called successors can become shackles.
Fashion is one thing, you kind of can change your silhouette and try this and try that. But I think that with skin care, you know anything that you put into your skin goes into your body, so you want to know it's actually good for you. So I think I don't believe in fashion when it comes to skin care if that makes sense.
Actresses can get outrageously precious about the way they look. That's not what life's about. If you starve yourself to the point where your brain cells shrivel, you will never do good work. And if you're overly conscious of your arms flapping in the wind, how can you look the other actor in the eye to respond to them?
I've got a funny old face. Someone described it once, and I think they were being kind, as character. But I know what they mean! I've never been that conventional. I suppose maybe it means that my face can look different in different lights, so I just try and sort of keep it simple when I'm going out, to still look like me.
We have to band together, but the thing in America is that people are terrified of losing their jobs... Maybe California needs to secede. The only thing that'll make any difference is the money... Tax dollars and losing that amount of money. It's one of the most economically powerful states, isn't it? That's where it hurts.
I love those moments on stage, on screen and in life when you dispense with language, when you sort of transcend it in a way, and certainly the experience of falling in love, I think, defies words, which is why poets, painters, musicians, actors have tried to describe that feeling, writers have just tried to put words to that.
Some days I'm very lazy, and some days I'm more inspired. I've got things I've had since I was fifteen - I don't throw anything away. I prefer to give it to a friend so I can wear it again...The way I dress doesn't necessarily have to do with fashion, or what is current, or what is in right now, it's more about rediscovering things.
o matter how much research you do, or invention you do, whether it's a character from a novel, a completely invented character or someone who actually existed, it's a work of faction. By the very fact you only have an hour and a half or two hours to tell a story, you're telescoping events and it is, in the end, a work of imagination.
We're growing up with a very illiterate bunch of children who have somehow been taught that film is fact when, in fact, it's invention. Hopefully, an historical film will inspire people to go and read about the history but in the end it is a work of fiction and selection. As for the armour itself, no it wasn't particularly comfortable.
Film just chews up actors like nobody's business, and I'm not particularly interested in being chewed up. I think the camera can only look at somebody's face for so long. I guess you have to accept the roles you think are right at the time. You can build a career, but these days there doesn't seem to be that much interest in people being actors.
Germany is a country that has absolutely had to since the Second World War ask itself massive moral questions. And it's reforged its identity based on culture. I mean, the amount of artists living and working in Berlin is unparalleled. It's one of the strongest economies, not only in Europe, but globally, and it's because of its understanding of the importance of culture.
We talked about trying to create an image that would somehow, to an audience, create the sense of awe, wonder and shock that the troops must have felt that their monarch - and a female monarch - went to the frontline of battle and was prepared to lay down her life. This speech is so well known and has been done in virtually every version of the events of Elizabeth's life.
With a role like Hedda Gabler, which is incredibly complicated, you often feel that you haven't even scratched the surface the first time around, so you relish the opportunity to do it again, particularly with an ensemble of actors and the company we assembled. But when you do that in films you somehow have to make some attempt to uncross people's arms and you have to justify why you're doing it.
That's definitely true! It was before my father died, so I can't attribute it to an obsession with death. When I was seven, I loved those old Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone. The Scarlet Claw was one of my faves. And I loved all the Halloween's and that film about the haunted house... Burnt Offerings, with Oliver Reed. Every birthday party was a slumber party and we'd watch horror films.
No, it’s very comforting actually, to know that you’re sitting in a long legacy of actresses who’ve played the role. I’m absolutely all for absorbing all of those influences, so you understand the pedigree of the part as much as you understand the figure in history… because you are playing the part. You don’t say: “Gosh, I want to play Peter Sellers…” because you can sort of do that in your own bathroom.
I'm old enough to remember the days when you spoke to one person from one outlet and that was the conversation. But now what happens is you speak to people and what you say gets translated into Portuguese, then into Mandarin, through a German prism and then back into English and bears little to no resemblance between - to the exchange or - that you had initially with the journalist or to what you originally said.
I had never done anything with blue screen before, or prosthetics, or anything like that. Lord of the Rings was like stepping into a videogame for me. It was another world completely. But, to be honest, I basically did it so that I could have the ears. I thought they would really work with my bare head.Working with Martin Scorsese was an absolute minute-by-minute education without him ever being grandiose about it.
You don't fully understand the meaning of a work until the audience responds to it. Because the audience completes the circle, and adds a whole other shade of meaning. Whenever you view something, and this is why great works of art survive decades and centuries, is because there's a door within the work that allows the audience to walk through and complete the meaning of the work. An audience isn't passive, nor are they unintelligent.
It's not just women in film, 18-year-old girls feel pressure to do preventative injecting. I see someone's face, someone's body who has had children and I think, they're the song lines of your experience, and why would you want to eradicate that? I look at people sort of entombing themselves and all you see is their little pin holes of terror... and you think, just live your life, death is not going to be any easier just because your face can't move.
It was fantastic to be able to have my kids on set. Dash, my eldest son, who’s not quite five, was into knights and his godmother had given him a plastic Marks & Spencer knights’ outfit and [first assistant director] Tommy Gormley said that he could stand to protect me during the scene where Clive [Owen] is talking about the immensity of sitting on the throne. I’m actually looking through an archway at my son standing in his knights’ costume protecting me!
When you’ve had children, your body changes; there’s history to it. I like the evolution of that history; I’m fortunate to be with somebody who likes the evolution of that history. I think it’s important to not eradicate it. I look at someone’s face and I see the work before I see the person... You’re certainly not staving off the inevitable. And if you’re doing it out of fear, that fear’s still going to be seen through your eyes. The windows to your soul, they say.
You know, when you see yourself on a big screen, I tend to watch from behind my hands. There is absolutely the regret. You always get that at the end of every project. That's what's great about theater: at least every night you get the chance to go out and re-offend. I'm endlessly disappointed, which is what propels me into the next project, probably, not to repair the damage but to kind of hopefully keep developing. Otherwise there's no reason to keep doing it, is there?
I think we should stop drinking bottled water. There's no need to be drinking it if you're living in western communities. The other thing I would suggest - and I feel it particularly here in Australia, because we have very severe drought - is to be aware of how much you're actually consuming. Right now, it's very rainy, but that doesn't mean we can drink all the water we want. Conserving and constantly thinking, "how much do I really need?" should definitely be part of our vocabulary.
My dreams tend to be like dog dreams. I'm usually so tired that I hardly dream at all. In a way, I do think that the zone one performs in - without getting too ooga-booga about it - it's like that moment when you wake up in the morning and you're emerging from a dream state but you're not quite up. Where are you? Can you hear the birds? Or is that the traffic? It's that zone in which I perform. It’s like one foot in reality and one foot in a dream state. I spend most of my life in that state!