Bernard Sahlins Quotes

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

You try, as an actor, to wear a mask; you're serving a story.

Every time I get a role, or the opportunity to explore a role, I look at it, and I think, 'What is the story we're trying to tell here?'

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

In the work that I normally do, you have a whole script, a whole arc, that you play. And I do believe a good actor will play every bit of information they're given.

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

I never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction.

Part of an actor's job is to draw up a back story.

I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

The beauty of performance for me is finding details with which to betray character.

When I read something, first I have an instinctual, emotional response to it. But of course, acting isn't only just feeling an instinct for what's going on in the moment with the character. You have to be able to carve it out and consider, follow, and create the whole journey that the character you play is going through.

That's kind of the fun part about acting. We do get the right to kind of get from A to Z any way we want, as long as we start at A and end at Z.

As an actor, your first priority is the work - immersing yourself in the role, backstory, and bringing that to screen.

Sometimes you read things that people don't even notice in a performance, that you just are moved by or understand that this actor is really living his or her life on the screen. The first time I realized that was when I watched Brando in 'On the Waterfront.'

The emotions of the actors are better when they understand the chronological factors that are adding to the story.

I rarely do any back story. I often get a thick bible of back story, but I can't use it. The back story is a tool of the writer. But I can only act what's in the scene.

For the longest time, I was in random cold matches for 30 minutes and tore the house down for no reason, and everyone complained, 'Why isn't he in some kind of a story?'

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

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.

Fans want to see a story with characters, and they want to see a story.

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.

The pleasure from acting comes from having great writing to work with. If it's well written and the character is interesting, then, as an actor, that's the raw material I need.

In 'There Will Be Blood,' my character was someone who was an actor himself almost. He had a rehearsed quality about him. He was a performance artist in a way.