Alison Pill Quotes

As an actor, I was taught, from an early age, that secrets are the most powerful thing that you can have on screen, and that what you withhold is as important as what you share.

When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

As an actor, you are always looking for subtext, for layers, for what's going on underneath.

Claude Rains was what we call an actor's actor. He was very involved with himself and his performance.

To be an actor, a true actor, you have to be brokenhearted.

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

When I get a role, I try to delve as deeply as possible into the character.

I don't mind a little Sturm und Drang. When I was doing 'Riding in Cars With Boys,' I wouldn't smile at anybody, because my character, Bev, was angry at the world. I'm the opposite. Inside my head I'd be like, God, I'll explain to you at the end of shooting that I'm not this person.

Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.

Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind of impossible.

I guess I'm just good at playing repressed individuals. I'm lucky because those are often the roles that catch people's eyes.

The big difference with Juliette and the others in that film is that she goes beyond acting.

The closer a part is to you, the harder it is to play. Anything else is just imitation. If I'm playing a Russian countess, I get the hat, the accent, the outrageousness. Easy. Playing a murderess? Perfect.

Dialogue is what a character's willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren't willing to share is what I do for a living.

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.'

What happens off-screen definitely informs your performance on screen.

For a time, I really thought acting was just impersonating. But impersonation is just big brush strokes, really. What makes acting different is empathy.

I don't think most people understand acting, even the people who call themselves savvy, even actors.

As actors we're always trying to use our creative imagination.

As an actor, it's your job to find the way to play a character. I think you can latch on to some things that might have happened.

I don't think secrets agree with me, I feel rumpled up in mind since you told me that.

I am not one of those actors who dwells on the histrionics and the subtext and future text of the character. I deal with the scenes that I'm doing at that specific time, because if I do that, they play in more of a real way.

The heart cherishes secrets not worth the telling

Usually there is a paradox in what a character wants. A conflict is built deeply within them. And then you put them in motion, throw everything at them until they reveal themselves further.

I won't even think about acting in a role where I didn't do a back story for a character.