Emotional Subtext Quotes

In TV and movies, you kill yourself spending all this time to think up the symbolism or what if that deer that runs across your hero's path somehow conveys what's going on inside your hero's head? When a lot of times, you just want to hear what he's thinking.

I like period drama because everyone is so restrained, but they have all these emotions raging underneath.

If you know why someone is doing what they're doing, why they're behaving the way they are, then that's your job to reveal that, and often that's situational. The storytelling does that, and then some of it's your job as an actor to make that subtext come to life.

In real life, when you have an emotional experience, it's never just because of the thing that's been said. There's the backstory. It's like [Ernest] Hemingway's iceberg theory - the current emotional moment is the tip of the iceberg and all of the past is the seven-eighths of the iceberg that's underwater.

The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'

Many film scores try to force an emotion into a story that inherently is not there in the first place.

Because I actually find the next take after they've controlled it a little bit and repressed the laughter is actually a really interesting take, because that's still going on underneath the surface. That struggle to maintain composure becomes part of the joy of the scene.