Melissa Ponzio Quotes

As an actor, you always want to feel like what you're doing is making a difference to the story.

Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'

As an actor, every opportunity, every role, everything that I do is an opportunity to have someone have a human experience with my work. I don't just want it to be about a cute wardrobe and a high paycheck.

I feel like my responsibility as an actor is to make characters as compelling and believable as possible.

The most fun part for an actor is the writing and the story and the character. That's very fulfilling.

Actors do movies because you want to make a connection; you want an audience to recognise themselves in what it is that you're depicting.

You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

I feel my job as an actor is to explore all sides of humanity.

As an actor, I'm always playing solitary characters. But as a director, I'm always making ensemble movies, which focus on lots of people's lives and how they intertwine.

The whole point of being an actor is to get satisfaction out of a role - unless you're just vain about celebrity. You're always looking for the one thing that will surprise you.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

There's no environment. Use your imagination. There's no fourth wall, whether it's the first time you've told this story about her life, or the sixth time.

Getting to share the stories in my head with other people and have them enjoy those stories, and having them come to see my characters as real. That's so cool.

'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.

In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

I look at scripts really for whether they can be moving or penetrate some kind of truth. You are constantly chasing that feeling as an actor when every part of a production comes together.

There are some times when I think acting can be a noble profession. And when those rare roles come along, like 'Down to the Bone,' you have the opportunity to be of service.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

Every role is challenging in its own way, but the most challenging roles are the ones that are badly written - then it's completely up to you to come up with something that is interesting to the story and myself as an actor.

It might sound glib, but in a sense, as an actor I'm a journalist and a psychologist recording life and truth.

Acting is about enhancing your life, not representing something that's missing.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

As an actor, it's great to play a strong leader with a heart of gold.

I just didn't want to get bored playing a character, and that's kind of the benefit of doing films; you've lived with a character for four or five months and that's it, and you walk away from that character and you feel like you told a story.