Shelley Duvall Quotes

I've always said the one advantage an actor has of converting to a director is that he's been in front of the camera. He doesn't have to get in front of the camera again, subliminally or otherwise.

A lot of people didn't realize that I acted before I did anything else.

I did some theatre. I had some smaller roles in a couple TV shows and films. I used to think I did a lot of acting, but my 'career' started when I started 'Homeland'.

I acted for so many years and sat on a million sets and worked with a million different directors so that is to me some of the best training you can get.

I didn't want people to think I'm just in the movies, where you make money and wait around for 13 hours before you get to do 20 minutes of work.

To be a good director, you have to spend a lot of time on actual sets, but today, there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time in dark rooms writing a script, and they'll go in and tell the story to some suit at a studio who says, 'Okay, this is great, let's go.' But that doesn't necessarily mean you know what to do once you're on set.

So most of my acting experience came in college when I was living away from them. I acted in various independent films, and I got some commercial work and stuff like that.

One of the best things - and something I'm grateful for every time I walk onto a film set - is my six and a half years on Dawson's Creek and the experience it afforded me in how to get comfortable with the camera.

I studied movies for many years, but I am professionally an actor because I, my background is actually a stage actor and acting.

I went to film school at Columbia and did that for a couple years and really thought I was going to be a filmmaker, and then I kind of drifted over to the acting side after that. I'd been an actor in high school, and when I got to college, it was all about film.

I'm beginning to think that I like the behind-the-scenes work as much as I do in front of the camera as I get a little bit older.

My university organised a casting call for a film and I won the role. I played a character who was dying of cancer. I remember in the middle of shooting going, 'Oh my God! Why did I decide to do this?' But people noticed me in it and I started getting invited to castings.

After my 12th standard, I started preparing for the film industry. I've had no formal acting training.

Working with great actors - being part of something of that magnitude and not knowing the business and what the business entailed or any of that. I was so wet behind the ears, I didn't know anything. It's, like, you're watching movies, and then here you are in front of those people and working with them. It was pretty interesting.

I played a bahu for six years on-screen. I really wanted to come out of that.

My first mother's role was in 'Aradhana.' But after that in mid to late 1980s, I was being offered more roles of mothers.

I know how a cinematographer wants to be treated by their director, and so I already have a leg up in that department, and I know what would be insulting to say to a DP because I've been one for so long.

The Dain Curse [Tom Fink] was a great job. I was in New York, and I was young - I think I'm 28 years old in that - and I got to work with James Coburn and Jean Simmons and Jason Miller. Plus, it was a Dashiell Hammett story, and I had a great character. It was fantastic to shoot.

There's is not enough money in Hollywood to lure me into making another picture with Joan Crawford. And I like money.

Well, I tried being in front of the camera as a student and that was terrifying. But the press stuff about me growing up on his [film] sets has been exaggerated. I was an extra as a kid and I was also a PA [production assistant] on one of his movies, so I was lucky to get production experience. But I was nowhere near him.

I love being on movie sets. It's a very particular setting. And not all of the time, most of the time, there's always people you don't like, and you have to see them every day.

[Payne] was a really great experience, and both John [ Larroquette] and JoBeth [Williams] over the years, it's been great reconnecting with them and working with them on other projects as well.

I've learned to do a movie and then not be in that place for a long time.

There's no great technical expertise in being a movie producer.

I got my first part in Silent Fall, 1994 - I guess I was 15 or 16 - which was really outrageous because I still knew nothing. I don't think I really learned how to land on my marks until after Empire Records in 1995, 'cause sometimes I'll see a shot in that film, and I'm like "Whoa, I just walked over to the corner."