Meisner Technique Quotes

There was only one elective at my college for acting, but thank God for that elective because we had a great teacher who introduced me to the Meisner technique for acting. Once I read that book, I said, 'Wow, if I could do that and have that honest moment on stage, that would be amazing.'

I stopped modeling so I could go to drama school at the William Esper Studio. It's Meisner.

Meisner technique was different than anything I'd ever experienced. It's a really great way to be accountable to your craft and to yourself, but also it takes that kind of focus and dedication to learn anything.

Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you've been blessed.

I'm not going back to acting class, although I've thought of it. The classic training that people get usually when they start out, I never had, and I always felt and still feel the lack of it, so there's a lot of basic stuff that I just don't have a clue about.

I took Meisner for a long time. I use a lot of sense memory and, well, I wouldn't say Method, but I can't really avoid getting into character.

Bette Davis had a phrase that called it "cigarette smoking acting" .

Modern acting is method acting, most of it. And there are sort of different schools, so I guess I'm not really from one school or another. I had a number of different teachers but they were all kind of drawing from the same pool, which is - What do you want? What are you doing to get what you want? And, what is in the way? These are basic acting questions. Knowing the answers to those questions. So you're talking about objectives and actions and obstacles. That's a sort of shorthand that gives you a language.

I don't really have a method or a technical process. I studied [Sanford] Meisner, and that's the thing that really works for me. That sort of instinctual, in the moment, what the other actors do, working off them and letting the story unfold, as opposed to having an idea of what the story should be.

I'm formally trained, I don't know what classically trained really means. I've worked with Sanford Meisner. And I've worked at Circle Rep with Marshall W. Mason and Lanford Wilson and some really good people. I was lucky. I had a lot of really good influences.

My favorite kind of acting scenes, or at least where I think people shine the brightest, are odes to Meisner technique scenes where people are face-to-face, and it's almost like a repetition exercise.

I studied technique for ten years, from age 7 to 17. I guess you could say I went more on the Stanislavski side than the Meisner side - there's always that wide divide among actors when it comes to technique.

There's no such thing as The Method. The term 'method-acting' is so much nonsense. There are many methods, many techniques.

Every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don't lay on complications that aren't necessary.

I'm not a method actress.

I'm not a method actor. I can't even explain so much what I do.

When I got out of high school, I was working in restaurants in New York City, when I heard Bill Anderson from The Neighborhood Playhouse was doing private lessons. I started taking classes, and it was a lot of improv and Meisner and repetition.

I grew up the son of an acting teacher but I've never been really good at articulating what that process is. It was always a bit more internal.

These kids only want to talk about acting method and motivation. in my day all we talked about was screwing and overtime.

My acting technique is a combination of a lot of different ones. A lot of it is Meisner.

I went to theater school, and if I spent time with one school of thought in this whole acting game, it's the Meisner approach of improvise-based acting. This does not mean that you improvise your acting, but that you focus on the other person.

That's one of my little expressions. I never really studied acting so I kind of kiddingly talk about "building your circle" and "mooding up," because I really didn't learn any technique.

I've trained primarily in Meisner Technique, and I've done a little bit of Groundlings and Upright Citizens Brigade just to get my feet wet in the improv world because I think that's really important. But most of the teachers I've worked with, I've gotten, like, references through agents or managers, and they're sort of independent.