Thomas McDonell Quotes

I was mainly a stage actor. I found film acting mechanical, because it was so technical - there was so much technique with the lamps and the movements of the camera.

You can see all sorts of things in film acting if you know where to look and what to look for. One thing I often notice is that the actor is looking for his mark, the place where he has to stand to be in the right place in the shot.

Film and television is just a different technique in terms of how to approach the camera but basically the job is the same; but what you learn as a craft in theater, you can then learn to translate that into any mediums.

And film acting is incredibly tedious, just by its nature. It's incredibly, mind numbingly slow.

Film acting is so different from theatre acting, and TV is about letting things pay off and not winning every scene.

In the theater you rehearse in order to do the performance. And in the movies the rehearsal and the performance are kind of the same thing. You're figuring it out and hopefully the camera is pointed at you when you're doing it.

I really learned how to act on camera through 'Power Rangers' because I hadn't done a lot of film and TV.

By the time I got to the Fox studio for my first major film, I knew how to hit a mark. I knew how to memorize lines. I knew how to pay attention.

We just started filming, and after every scene was shot, we had a rehearsal for the next one.

In theater, you get to rehearse several weeks, you memorize everything, and by the time you open, you know what the play is. In film, it's almost the opposite. You do your work on your own and maybe have a couple of minutes to rehearse. When the camera rolls, you generally don't know what's going to happen.

On the stage you develop a character that's different from yourself. In a film they're always saying, 'Walk over here. Say this line. Be you.'

The difference - the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.

Television is face acting, and film is eye acting.

There isn't much improvisation in film - there's virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don't necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it's much broader on a stage.

What I do on film is part of my profession.

Rarely in film acting do you get to do a scene for very long.

As an actor, you get into makeup, you get into hair, you come out of your trailer, and you hit your mark. As a director, you're the first one there and the last one to leave.

I think film and television actually is a lot harder. Acting onstage is physically more arduous, but to get to emotional truth within a scene, it's much tougher to do it on film.

Actors become very professional and proficient about watching out for each other's light and not stepping on each other's lines.

For a movie actor, the biggest challenge on TV is the number of close-up shots.

Theatre is something that keeps me very alert, and I am actively creating whether I am on stage or directing. In films, I feel I become more of an introvert, going deeper in the realism of a character.

Being an actor in TV or movies is different. A film or TV actor, if put in theatre, won't know certain dimensions, while a theatre actor won't know certain things when he comes before the camera. So I think a film actor can learn emoting from this theatre counterpart, while the theatre actor can learn about camera techniques from the film actor.

Rehearsing is more about blocking in the case of movies, I think, and blocking, of course, is very important to the beauty of a scene.

I have only recently got interested in film, and it is a strange way of working in many ways. But actually, when it is at its best, it's quite an extraordinary way of working between a director and an actor, to really explore an inner life.

I'm not an actor that tends to care. I don't ask 'Is this a close up? Is this a master? Is this a wide? What are you doing? If I look up and notice the camera I go 'Oh, it's a big one today, must be an IMAX.' And that's kinda it for me because it doesn't affect what I'm doing.