Actors Quotes - Page 98

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According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

I fell in love with Bruce Lee after I watched his movies, and I wanted to become a kung-fu practicer, and I would like to be someone like Bruce Lee. That's why I learned kung-fu, and that's why I picked the wing chun style, because it's his style. That's why I decided to be an actor, to go into show business, because of him.

When I come up against a director who has a concept that I don't agree with, or maybe I just haven't thought of it or whatever, I'd be more prone to go with them than my own because I want to be out of control as an actor, I want them to have the control, otherwise it's going to become predictably my work, and that's not fun.

They were all wonderful [on Andy Griffith Show], but I enjoyed Andy and Don and Ron the most. Ron played little Opie so well. He really took acting seriously and worked hard to deliver his lines well. Andy was always fun and liked to tease. Don was nothing like Barney. Don was very quiet, which shows what a good actor he was.

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Some of the downbeat pictures, in my opinion, should never be made at all. Most of them are made for personal satisfaction, to impress other actors who say "Oh, God! what a shot, what camera work!" But the average person in the audience, who bought his ticket to be entertained, doesn't see that at all. He comes out depressed.

The visual stuff just lives inside of you. As far as really being able to take care of an actor on a set, how to talk to an actor, and how to get what you need out of a scene is probably where I might know a thing or two. Although, in TV, the actors are pretty much left alone. It's really the writer's medium more than anything.

The actors I was most impressed with and who were influencing my taste were all movie actors, so I always wanted to do movies but I didnt want to go to Hollywood and become a waiter in the meantime. The chances are really slim that an actor will be discovered in Hollywood. ... Ive never had to compromise myself for a job, ever.

The life of an actor is very random. It can be exhilarating but terrifying - you do wonder day to day where the next job will come from. Some of my friends are very talented people, but you see them out of work - which can be tough. If you wanted that kind of security, though, I guess you wouldn't be an actor in the first place.

While you're making the film and working with the actors, if you want to have a little room to breathe and experiment and play, it grows, and you want that to happen. It's not enough to just shoot the script. You've gotta come up with new inspiration, as you shoot it. There's gotta be room for that and time for that, so it grows.

I'm an actor. My life as an actor depends on who sends me what. I'm just taking the best stuff that I can find that's sent my way, regardless of how big or little the paycheck is. I don't want to work for scale anymore. I'm at a point now where, no matter how good something is, I'm not going to kill myself and end up in the hole.

Period films to me are very often alienating to the audience. There's very often a formality. A staunchy quality to them that comes from the misenscene. It also comes from the performances of the actors, because they're acting Victorian which really means that they're just acting the way they've seen previous actors act Victorian.

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

Basically, actors arrive in a bubble. They have a little sealed bubble around them and it's basically [comprised of] their agents, their last film, their next film, their press agent, and their per diems - all these things, they cocoon themselves with and you have to puncture that bubble on each of them to make them be in your film.

Even Hollywood millionaires are now clamoring for legal protections for their illegal-alien nannies and gardeners, though such elites would hardly countenance a similar legal laxity that would allow foreign film technicians, screenwriters, and actors to flood southern California to work in their industry for a fourth of their own pay.

Ellen [Page] and I had only met a couple of times, but had mutual admiration for each other's work. When I first heard about the film [Into the Forest], I was excited to get a chance to work with one of my peers because it's usually one or the other. You don't get to work with all of the other actors that you're usually competing with.

If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence - like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives - you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act.

Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' -the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity.

Directing requires great discipline, that ability to be in and out at the same time. The great ones I've worked with are like generals. It's a bit like a small war on that level. The great ones have that combination of freedom and control. I'm nowhere near that. There's still so much to do as an actor. I have enough to explore with that.

Sometimes I say I feel more like a dancer than an actor, because there are things implied about being an actor that I don't really like. I feel more comfortable with the word 'performer'. I like being the thing. I like being the doer. There's a factualness to it. And then certain resonances happen out of how you apply yourself physically.

I was thinking maybe about being a lawyer. I realized I was interested in becoming a priest at one point. I was just interested in stuff where I could do something I really believed in. And then, I realized if I become an actor, I don't have to choose. I get to do everything. It's worked out so far. But what I really want to do is direct.

The West has never been all of the world that matters. The West has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the West's power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed)... It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it has been the world that has been hit - and hit hard - by the West.

Theres this little box that African-American actors have to work in, in the first place, and I was able to rise above that box. I could have done a bunch of movies where I stayed as the Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond persona. But I didnt want to be doing the same thing all the time. Every now and then, you crash and burn, but thats part of it.

The first state an actor experiences onstage is the one he just experienced in life. One needs great courage not to portray this experience. One must surrender entirely to the power of one s artistic nature. It will do all the necessary things. Do not impose any solution upon yourself in advance. The quality to develop in an actor is courage.

My favorite part about my job is not that it is never boring; it is that it is always exciting. There is always something new to learn. There is always something interesting to get from someone else. Whether it is an actor, or a sound engineer, there is so much to learn and there will never be nothing to learn. There is always something there.

You cannot assume that somebody can define you. You cannot assume that the other person is right. No matter how they say it to you, no matter with how much force they say, ‘Oh my god, you’ll never make it; oh my god, you’re not bright; you could never do this’—that’s one person. I can’t tell you how many people told me I would never be an actor.

Because [writers] Dan Weiss and David Benioff have done such a great job in adapting them, that's what we work with. It serves no purpose to anybody for actors to come onto a set with a well-thumbed copy of the source material and start querying why this or that line has been left out of the script. It's probably been left out for a good reason.

I love that process in which there is no safety net. Then the actor also can allow mistakes, because there's no such a thing as a mistake. You're working with good actors, that thing that starts as a mistake becomes actually the life of what is going to follow in the scene. I find that it is fantastic, and for me it is easier than for the actors.

Werner Herzog, I knew him for so many years, when Fassbinder was at his highest moment. But we had a rule: An actor from Fassbinder could never work with an actor of Werner Herzog or Wim Wenders. Because if we would have done that, we would have been spies. "Ah, you worked with Werner - how was it? How did he direct you?" I was Fassbinder's actor.

I played a lot of serious parts in a lot of TV movies and early miniseries but what happens is that you get sort of locked into "Oh no, he's a serious actor." Well, I was a serious actor for nine years or 10 years and then I get into comedy and everybody said, "Oh no, he's funny. He can do comedy," and then all of a sudden, you're just a comedy guy.

The thing about the books is that they really talked a lot about what was going on inside of Bond and the inner dialogue. It's very hard to project that onto a screen because Bond doesn't talk a lot about how he feels. But, when you have an actor like Daniel Craig, he's able to convey the inner turmoil and the conflicts. He's given Bond his humanity.

For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field' or a system in and of itself. Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures

A lot of the people I'm working with are not actors, or it's their first time in a movie. I'm not trying to shape performances, coax performances out of them. It's more like I want to put them in situations that naturally work or allow them to be themselves. If it's not happening, I'll just completely switch it up, rather than trying to make it work.

Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the internet) happen to motivate infelicitous technological designs. For instance, designs that celebrate the noosphere tend to energize the inner troll, or bad actor, within humans.

Glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid?an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at thetop, and? It isinvisible, solid, in short a joyous and paradoxical thing, asgood a material as any tobuild a life from.

In my personal life I'm very conservative. I've been married to the same person for nearly 50 years, I'm scrupulous about paying bills, avoiding debt. I'm very careful. But as an actor I'm pretty reckless. I've done a lot of things that, when I see myself on screen, I have to shut my eyes. And I've made a whole bunch of movies that nobody sees, including me.

When I was a teenager, I thought I wanted to be an actor. I worked on an Indian soap opera that was my first exposure to production. But I quickly became disillusioned by acting and seeing that in the movies I loved and the TV I loved, no one looked like me. There weren't going to be any leading roles that would be interested in casting someone with my face.

You can say something that can really help and actor and you can say something that can really get in the way of an actor's performance, kind of cut them off from their instincts and really get into their heads. And every actor's different. Every actor requires something different. Being an actor, for me, was the greatest training to be a writer and director.

As Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor. My sister [Maggie Gyllenhaal] came up to me recently after she saw this movie, Southpaw, the movie I did, and she thought there was this exploration of that type of presentation, and a bit of representation as well, if I could be totally honest, where she was deeply moved.

The bottom line is that I'm an actor, so when somebody pitches me a great part, it's a no-brainer. You never know what it's gonna be like, in terms of the actual experience. You can be really excited about a part that can turn out shitty, you can have a bad time, there's a bad egg or two or three, in the bunch, or the producers are weird, or something like that.

I come from Nova Scotia, and I'd never seen a theater or been inside of a theater. When I was 17, my dad asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I thought I would like to be an actor. I didn't have any idea what it was to be an actor. None. I'd wanted to be either an actor or a sculptor, which are both essentially the same thing. That's how it all started for me.

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

They're a handful, but Emily deals with that all the time and, as an actor, I deal with that all the time, so you just ignore it. When Julia [Jones] first came on set, she was like, "How do you deal with it?," and I told her, "You just tune it out after awhile." They were competing with each other, doing push-ups and just being ridiculous, so you just have to zone out.

There are days when you're in a good groove and the actor really understands the part and comes as prepared every day as you are and is so inside it. And then there's the day where, for whatever reason, it's just a harder slog. And I feel like those are the days where all the preparation and everything becomes more necessary because you have to find a third route there.

Business is very personal. For me, everything is extremely personal. With actors, the fact that I write helps, because when you say to an actor "Oh I want you to do it a little bit more ...," without saying what you want more of, then the actor doesn't know what to do. But if you can put into words exactly what you want, then the experience of writing is helpful with that.

Acting is bad acting if the actor himself gets emotional in the act of making the audience cry. The object is to make the audience cry, but not cry yourself. The emotion has to be inside the actor, not outside. If you stand there weeping and wailing, all your emotions will go down your shirt and nothing will go out to your audience. Audience control is really about the actor

I went out to Bali, and I cast all of these supporting roles. I love that stuff. I just love actors. And then, Ryan Murphy asked me to direct second unit for him on Eat Pray Love. I was already booked on something else, but I joined them later. And then, I wrote him a thank you email and I got no response. I was like, "Okay, that's it." We didn't interact much on set either.

You have to believe in yourself and always strive for the best. Whether that is getting the best actor, the most talented cinematographer, or the best location for your story, you have to have the hunger to want it and be willing to do what it takes to get it. A filmmaker should never be satisfied with their work. There should always be something that they want to improve on.

I don't normally get very star struck. However, I was just at a table read for a movie. It was an animated movie where they have all the actors come in and sit around a big table and read the whole script out loud so you can see what's working, what's not working. And this is an animated movie that Paul McCartney is doing and he's producing it. So I got to meet Paul McCartney.

It's not that difficult to find the rage or the anger. We all have that in us, and luckily, actors and actresses get to portray it, and it's not frowned upon. Everybody has that in them. Everybody has wanted to kill somebody at one time or another. Everybody has been really, really angry about something, so if you just call on that in yourself, you find it's not that difficult.

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