Third Act Quotes

[At age 76:] A good life is like a good play -- it has to have a satisfying and exciting third act.

Well, the film initially - we had decided to pair joy with fear because I don't know about you - for me fear was a major motivator in junior high. So we thought there's probably some good stuff there... As the film went on, we had developed all these great scenes that were really funny, but in the third act, it wasn't adding up to anything.

As I saw my 60th birthday approaching, I thought,What did 60 mean to me? I figured I'd probably live until I'm about 90, which meant that I was at the beginning of what I call my third act. As an actress, I know how important the third act is. It makes sense of the first and second acts. You can have first and second acts that are interesting, but you don't know what they mean. Then a good third act pulls it all together. And so I knew that, because I sat by my father's side over the long months when he was dying.

I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.

Certainly, 3rd acts of any movie are hard. It's always hard to have something that will give you the promises from the beginning of the movie. That's true for all movies.

I enjoy politics, but if I had a third career - and I've had multiple careers - my third act would be acting.

You may be old, you may be in your third act, but you can still be vital and sexual and funny. Life isn't over.

I think we have a culture that creates heroes and then needs to knock them down, and then you have to see what the third act brings.

Harrison is very much part of this one, but really it’s about finding him; he comes in in the third act.

The first act is the easiest to plot. The second act is always the hardest to plot. Generally a good, you know, sometimes the third act can be difficult because you can get into a rut in the third act - everybody runs to their Corvette, has a chase, and you catch the bad guy.

I enjoy a third act, and I like stories with ending. A lot of my frustration with serialized storytelling is a lot of shows don't have a third act. They have an endless second act, and then they find out it's their last year and often have to hustle to invent a third act, but they were never necessarily organically meaning to begin with.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

I will say there is only one caveat as far as 'Logan' goes: I got to the end and went, 'OK, what happens next?' To me, as an audience member, damn. If you can get to the end of the third act of a trilogy and your reaction is 'what the hell happens next,' someone did their job incredibly.

I find most American films annoy me because their third act tends to be tying up loose ends and returning to moral values and killing the monster. I think most of the scripts I read to tend to go in that direction and I find that very, very unsatisfying. I want the stories to have loose ends and to pose some questions - or even say things that aren't too comfortable.

There are so many projects that you go into hoping the story works, and here comes a new third act and that kind of thing.