Acting Methodology Quotes

You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.

I don't know acting, but I choose good stories and portray emotions according to the story.

Meryl Streep doesn't care how she looks. She just surrenders to the truth of the character. Not everybody has the ability to do that. They look good and they can pretend to be that person, it's not the same as being that person. And there are not many actors who will surrender to that.

In every movie, there's always some physical thing that triggers the character for me. In 'The Long Walk Home,' it was the girdle. Every time I'd put that girdle on, I'd feel my character wiggle to life.

Every time when I start preparing my character for a movie, I always try to make up and create my own background story for the role in order to fill it with life.

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.

Once, Naseeruddin Shah told me that the wafer shop was the best acting school that I could have attended. And I completely agree. I observed every customer very minutely and picked up some quirk or the other. Later, I used those experiences while playing different characters.

Reacting is so important to the craft of acting.

As a matter of principle, I always come to a film like a blank slate, I don't learn my lines in advance. With this approach, I feel clean.

What I mostly do is take the script, analyse the hell out of it, see what's in there, see what kind of person I'm dealing with, and then forget I'm playing a father and just play a person who exemplifies all those things.

The secret of being a great actor is a love of food.

Chris Guest has his own form. It's a way of working that is really intense, and you can commit a lot, and you focus a lot. You get to bring a lot. You get to bring things maybe you haven't seen before. You're asked to care a great deal for these people who you're playing and create heart and empathy.

You're always dealing with emotions as an actor.

I don't think about the characters I choose to play, analytically or consciously.

When you're portraying someone that really existed, there has to be a time as an actress where you leave reality and move into the fantasy world so you can do your job of creating a character.

When you have an actor on set who is playing themselves in a movie that is about the most cathartic, most traumatizing event of their lives, you don't even have to mention that.

The film I did with Bobby De Niro, 'The King of Comedy' - an awful lot came to me out of that movie because De Niro never allowed me any room to be crazy. If I had tried to play it the way I would normally play it and get hysterical, Bobby would punch me.

I think there are actors who are like, 'Okay, what am I doing, how am I doing it, what's the appeal? Tell me what to do, what are the exact lines from the script? Okay, I got it.' I am not that way. I would be a terrible bus driver. I'd want to be like, 'Oh, let's take this side road! Let's see what happens when we go down this back alley.'

I don't want to know about the lives of other actors and I don't want people to know too much about me. If we don't know about the private lives of other actors, that leaves us as clean slates when it comes to playing characters. That's the point, they can create these other characters and I can believe them.

The trick to acting is not to show off, it's to think the thoughts of the character.

In a way, I don't create anything; I just open myself to the character, and the character takes over. Of course, I'm aware of it, and I'm driving it, but I don't try to control it. If I try to control it, it goes wrong.

I have to do some mental gymnastics as an actor sometimes, to remember not to let certain things in.

I just want to bring as much natural as I can. I'm not saying that people who take acting lessons are false. They're much better than I am, but it doesn't work for me.

I often talk with other actors about that time when you've just finished a job, because I think you do take on the characteristics of some of the characters you play. Sometimes it can be a great thing and sometimes it's a bit haunting because you're not quite sure how to leave it on set. My dad talks about it as being 'de-personalised.'

I have played Dracula a thousand times on stage and I find I have become thoroughly settled in the technique of the stage and not of the screen.