Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like to do the pictures before people get too self-conscious. I like to be spontaneous and get a shot before the subject thinks too much about it.
It's very rare to get a film script that has good dialogue. A lot of the time, you spend on film sets really fighting to find out how to say the words.
I don't quite understand what Tolstoy's actual personal view of Anna is - whether he likes her or hates her, whether she's the heroine or the antiheroine.
I've always gravitated towards people who are extreme. Whether its drugs, or kicking down doors. Normally, the people in my life had to escape to get back.
It's fantastic to have the opportunity to work abroad, and do all that, but there is a certain point where you're just like, 'Oh, I'd love to work at home.'
I tried college for three months but I was desperately unhappy. I just wanted to perform. I was getting straight As but I had no friends and cried every day.
I find more interesting roles for women in period pieces. I do personally like watching period films; I think you can really get lost in the fantasy of them.
I do think that acting is such an unpredictable job, and you're away a lot. If you're dating somebody outside the industry, it can be hard to understand that.
I don't think that you can fake warmth. You can fake lust, jealousy, anger; those are all quite easy. But actual, genuine warmth? I don't think you can fake it.
It's a difficult thing when you try and make a film of a book that you really love. You have about two hours to tell the story, and it's never going to be enough.
I wasn't allowed to do commercials. I wasn't allowed to do TV series. I wasn't allowed to do soaps or basically anything that would mean I missed too much school.
I started working when I was seven, and ever since then I've been saving for an apartment. Even before that I had a little jam jar designated for my apartment money.
It's impossible. You try to have any kind of relationship with your family, with a man, or with a friend, and you have to be on the phone and the Internet the entire time.
If only I wasn't an atheist, I could get away with anything. You'd just ask for forgiveness and then you'd be forgiven. It sounds much better than having to live with guilt.
I don't have a problem with my body. I'm not just going to strip off all my clothing, but if the part calls for it and I don't think there's any way round, I'm absolutely fine.
I don't want to deny my femininity. But would I want to be a stay-at-home mother? No. On the other hand, you should be allowed to do that, as should men, without being sneered at.
Half of my mum's family is Welsh. I remember when I was a kid she used to read to me, and witches and wizards in books always had a Welsh accent, so I guess I took it from that really.
It's an interesting thing when you discover something about yourself. To go: 'Wow, I'm not the person I thought I was. I'm in the middle of something and I can't actually deal with it.'
I think women's bodies are a battleground and photography is partly to blame. Our society is so photographic now, it becomes more difficult to see all of those different varieties of shape.
What's nice about playing somebody real is that generally there's more information about them, so a lot of the questions that you'd otherwise have to make up the answers to are already there.
Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.
I'm a tomboy beanpole? I can't use a computer, so maybe I'm a bit out of the loop. I don't know whether to be flattered or not flattered. The beanpole bit, is that good? Can you be a sexy beanpole?
I would be extremely stupid if I said that my looks had absolutely nothing to do with what I do, it [moviemaking] is a visual medium. I'm perfectly aware of that, the face and the body help. Of course they do.
I think quite often when you have a hell of a lot more money and time, as you very much do on a big studio film, you don't necessarily have to make the decisions right there. You can always goback and reshoot it.
I find it quite difficult on studio films because there are so many different executives and things like that that you have to go through, so very often getting that definitive opinion is actually quite difficult.
I went through voice coaching. I was absolutely terrified. I thought my knees were going to buckle, and the first couple of takes I sounded like a pubescent boy. I didn't realise I was going to have to do it live.
I've got a lot of experience with anorexia - my grandmother and great-grandmother suffered from it, and I had a lot of friends at school who suffered from it. I know it's not something to be taken lightly and I don't.
But acting is very much a profession that is you're hot one moment and not the next - and that is totally cool. I think that's what I find most fascinating and most exciting about it - is that it can be gone in a puff of smoke.
All through my life what I've loved doing is watching movies. I love the escapism of film, I love stories. So it is incredible to be able to be in them as much as I am, to see them from the first stitch in a costume to the end product.
I don't think I can call myself an actress yet. I just don't think my skill level is that high. I hope that with every job it gets better. But until I'm good, I can say I'm trying to be an actor, but I don't think I've completely made it.
You already feel unsure of yourself, and then you see your worst fears in print. It really knocked me - which is why, I think, I was working, working, working, because I was trying to run away from the fact that I thought I couldn't do it.
They always pencil in my boobs. I was only angry when they were really droopy. For King Arthur, for a poster, they gave me these really strange droopy tits. I thought, well if you’re going to make me fantasy breasts, at least make perky breasts.
Some people say Dylan Thomas mischievous, he's a child, and other people say he's quite demonic. I don't think we should dictate about him, if that's your view of him, that's wonderful, but it's great to know that other people think differently.
[The press] said to me yesterday 'How does it feel to be called anorexic?' and I had no idea that I was. I'm not saying there aren't people in the film industry that suffer from it, because I am sure that there are. But I'm quite sure I don't have it.
I have no idea whether I am completely sane. I don't think anybody is. I see the world through my eyes. It's sometimes a strange world. I hope I don't hurt people. You hope not to hurt yourself too much, either. Maybe that's the definition of keeping yourself in check?
It's a tricky one when you're playing somebody who is mad. There's often the big actor's question, if you're playing a part like that: do you take it to be an internalized thing, pull the audience in, or do you go full-out, and kind of present it as quite a shocking thing?
Film is a much lonelier process than theatre. You really don't have any rehearsal time in film. You don't shape it together... with theatre, there is a complete kind of family atmosphere. The sociable side of this business is the theatrical side, it really isn't the film side.
The celebrity thing's completely crazy. I think I just have to move away or give it up altogether. I couldn't have kids in the situation I'm in now. But I could just do something else. That's probably what's going to happen. I made a decision very recently that I want a life instead.
I love costume dramas, I love performing in them, because in a funny kind of way, you feel more free. You know about the period, you can read the books, you can see the paintings, but you've never actually going to know what it was like. You can kind of stretch those boundaries a bit.
You live with a writer [a mother], and you grow up with their words, their kind of fantasies, and I'd pretty much seen every single one of her plays, and been in a lot of rehearsal rooms, so it felt very natural and easy. It was lovely to get an opportunity to do that professionally as well.
I think that there's absolutely no point trying to force your body to be anything than what it is. I think that when you see people who are really pushing themselves to terrifying lengths to achieve what is perceived as being beautiful today, then that's just terrifying, it's really terrifying.
I totally agree. I hate knowing too much when I'm going to the cinema and watching as a viewer. I don't want to know that the actor has just gone through a divorce. I don't want to know that the person is an alcoholic. It just gets in the way of my pleasure of watching the character on the screen.
I didn't know this about myself, but when 'Pirates of the Caribbean' came out I realised that I didn't enjoy a huge amount of recognition. I didn't react to it well, but I think life is about finding out who you are and what you like. So I started doing independent movies and art-house films instead.
I don't read my reviews. Unless I'm unfortunate enough to catch something by accident, which happens, and it's always a bad review. Always, it's amazing. I will be sitting in a café, and I will open a random paper right to the page of the review.... And then you're sucked in and go home and never want to go out again.
It's obvious to say you can't please everybody and there are always going to be people who are going to say, I just don't like you. There's nothing I can do about that. I'm aware, probably much more aware than my harshest critic, of what my own problems are with my acting ability. I'm very, very critical of myself, and I don't ever want to not be.
I worked with John Maybury on The Jacket and I think he's an extraordinary film-maker. I read the first drafts of this piece when I was working on The Jacket, and we'd so fallen in love with him that we thought he was the only person that should direct this! We wrote poems for him, we sent him champagne and cakes. Four years later he finally read it.
Humans who see something different than them want to hate it and tear it down. Britain had a government policy that allowed prejudice to destroy someone's life, and today there is still homophobia at home and elsewhere, like Russia or Greece. It's still a relevant discussion. While women have it better than the 1940s or '50s, sexism is still prevalent.
I don’t know what happened through the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s that took feminism off the table, that made it something that women weren’t supposed to identify with and were supposed to be ashamed of. Feminism is about the fight for equality between the sexes, with equal respect, equal pay, and equal opportunity. At the moment we are still a long way off that.
I’ve noticed that the people who started on film still have the ability to see the person in front of them. Whereas for a lot of photographers who have only ever worked in digital, the relationship between the photographer and the person who they’re taking a picture of sort of doesn’t exist anymore. They’re looking at a computer screen as opposed to the person.
I think sometimes it's sort of easier to be playing a role based on a real person because there's quite often a lot more information, you're not making it up, it's there in books, it's there in research form. But really the questions you ask about the character, and why people behave, and where they come, and how they've ended up in the places they've ended up are the same.