Ellen Burstyn Quotes
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There's no doubt that the patriarchy that we live in also controls the movie industry. The heads of the studios are men, and it's reflected in the scripts they buy and the work that gets made.
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I'm always learning and trying new things. When you stop learning, you start dying.
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Directors tend to kind of let me do what I want to do.
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The real work of an actor goes on inside, and I don't think it changes from director to director - I always go for broke! But I don't get a lot of direction, unfortunately.
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I couldn't kill a chicken, I couldn't kill a cow - I was a vegetarian too at that time - so I thought, well what is there that I could kill? I couldn't kill this and I couldn't kill that.
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I've liked all the directors I've worked with a lot. And the ones I like best are the ones that have really good taste about what take was best.
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I sketched out a rough story for them and the director said, well it's a good story but we have the go-ahead from Universal to make this script and did I want to do it. I said no, and they left.
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All of my life I have asked the question, 'Who would I be if I had grown up in a loving home?' And I have no way to answer it. I don't know if I would be placid and satisfied with whatever is around me - a happy, jolly, sedentary person.
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To me, it's a very moral film. If my son were a teenager now, I would drag him to see it.
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It's a sin to have your films not to make money.
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My mother was very glamorous. She was very beautiful, and she had a lot of friends; she was fun and loved to drink.
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I talked to women who lived there, to get their speech patterns and outlook on life - and how narrow that is.
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I feel compassion is so important to develop in ourselves. It's one of the most important elements of being a human being.
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I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking, 'Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!' If I don't hurry up, her grandmother!
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Well my taste wasn't very good when I first started out. But later, when I began to appreciate the art of acting, I would say the actress I most admire is Vanessa Redgrave.
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The only Shakespeare I ever did was a production of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' two years in a row in my garden in Rockland County on the Hudson River in the 1980s. I had all the actors from the Actors Studio come out, and we made our own costumes.
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I wanted to work on this central problem of killing. How you go about killing. Now, in the film I had to kill my children - well, I didn't want to get that far.
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They pulled Resurrection out of the theatres, so it was running in New York and I was nominated for the Oscar and there was no ad in the newspapers to say it was running. So it was literally killed.
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It's been awhile. My Oscar is getting kind of tarnished. I looked at it a couple of years ago and thought I really needed a new one.
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I did my famous cabbage soup diet, so I was able to do it.
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She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings.
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She loses 50 pounds in the film, and goes from fairly sane to totally out of her mind. So for the first part of the film I was wearing a 40 pound fat suit, which is very, very uncomfortable. But the worst part was the neck.