Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
They were like little palaces: all rococo or art deco. You'd walk in off those hot streets into a nice, air-cooled theater, and you'd spend all day watching Cagney or Jimmy Stewart. It cost all of 17 cents.
I studied with Strasberg, Elia Kazan. They raised the bar. They weren't easy to please, and they made you achieve the best you could do. That's what a teacher does: he infuses you with passion for something.
What I'm saying not a lot of people say: What is considered good acting today isn't necessarily good acting, because everybody knows what they are doing. Doubt is an important part of the human being. Trust has to be attained.
Playing a drunk doesn't mean being a drunk, only bad actors try to be drunk. A real drunk tries to be sober, he wants another drink. How a character hides their feelings tells us who they are, no one shows their feelings except bad actors.
A lot of the time with an independent production, you go onto the set, and you rehearse it in front of the crew, and at that point, the cinematographer takes over. You start accommodating the camera instead of the camera accommodating you.
The modern cineplexes are mundane, dull boxes. But 'The Majestic' pays tribute to the movie palaces that made people feel like royalty. It honors a time when pictures helped Americans get through grim periods like the blacklist and the war.
Most acting today on television is like a locomotive on a track. Everybody knows what they are doing. The problem of writing today is everyone sounds the same. We speak differently. We think differently. People are different. And that's the beauty of it.
I've always felt, pound for pound, I'm one of the best guys around; but you get stuck in people's eyes in a certain way, and it takes an imaginative director who will look at you and realize you can play different kinds of parts because you are an actor.
My mantra is "stay perpendicular." Horizontal is not as good. Half the people that came along and up with with me are either gone to another dimension or don't remember what they had for lunch. I'm fortunate. I don't know why. I just want to have a good time.
As a Jew, there's a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It's amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There's a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.
I don't like to sound immodest, but I believe in what I can do. Sometimes it's been frustrating because I haven't gotten to bat; if you're on the bench, and an unimaginative person doesn't see you as right for a certain role, you don't get the chance to hit the home run.
I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and 'inevitability.' How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.
An awful lot of actors who are considered very good actors are not very good actors. There are people who just strike gold, they have intrinsic talent, but the point is that if they did train, it would not inhibit them. If they were with a good teacher, it would only broaden them more.
I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn't know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don't think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.
Any good director creates a playground. That's what they do. They hire the right actor, open the door and let them play because stuff will happen, right then and there. The audience wants to believe that what's going on is happening for the first time, ever. That's what acting is. That's what good scene writing is.
The talented actor needs craft. When you do a stage play, you do it once each night in chronological order. In a film you're going to wind up doing a scene 15-20 times, just by the nature of the process. If I tell you a joke once, it's funny. The more times I tell, the less funny it is. How do you get to the point where you can laugh again? You also may have to cry again and again.
If it bothers me on the page, I don't do it. If it attracts me on the page and moves me, makes me think a bit, makes me laugh, makes me cry, I'm interested in it. If it's there on the page, it means it's there and up to me to bring it out. I have done some films along the way that have been screwed up and not as good as they read. Some films that are not that good on the page turn into good movies. So I'm fallible is what I'm saying.
The actor has to have some degree of craft, along with the talent. No one tries to laugh except bad actors. No one tries to cry except bad actors. How a character hides his feelings tells us who he is. Most people don't know that, and most actors don't do that. Therefore, there are a lot of actors who put me to sleep, that are considered good actors, but they're predictable and boring. I know how the scene is going to end before it ends.
A good director creates a playground for actors, and lets them go. The trick for a good director is in casting properly, and creating the playroom, and then they'll get stuff that they don't expect, and can't even direct. All the audience wants to believe is that whatever is happening, it is happening for the first time. They want to see the people within the work exchanging dialogue and action in that moment. There are not a lot of actors that can do that.
People are in denial all the time, hiding things. If I tell you a racist or dirty joke and you laugh, you're telling me something about yourself, which you don't want to reveal. Accessing that hidden side is what good acting is all about. And there are only a handful of people in the entire United States who interest me as actors, who surprise me. Even people who write about it, don't know anything about good performance. At least when you work at General Motors, you know something about cars.