Martin Landau Quotes
-
I've got two daughters, and it's impossible for me to say one of them is a favorite.
-
I started teaching when I was in my 20s because Lee Strasberg asked me to, and he didn't do that with a lot of people.
-
Bad guys don't think they're bad guys. Hitler probably thought he was a wonderful guy doing some wonderful and righteous work for Germany.
-
The way a character sounds is so important to how you're going to play him.
-
To really have craft, you must be able to repeat something as one has to do in films.
-
The modern cineplexes are mundane, dull boxes. But 'The Majestic' pays tribute to the movie palaces that made people feel like royalty. It honors a time when pictures helped Americans get through grim periods like the blacklist and the war.
-
I've turned down a lot of roles. Some of them made stars out of the people. I have no regrets.
-
Sergio Leone came to see me when I was doing 'Mission Impossible.' He wanted me to do 'A Fistful of Dollars.' I turned him down. I didn't want to get stuck as a stoic Western movie star.
-
A lot of the bad guys I've played just haven't had much dimension to them.
-
I run the 'Actors Studio' on the West Cost. I'm artistic director of that.
-
I create each character as an individual, coming from a certain place, sounding a certain way, having been introduced to things a certain way.
-
I always believed that all it would take was a decent role. I felt like a pinch hitter with a leaden bat: that if I got a chance, I could hit a home run.
-
I run the Actor's Studio on the West Coast, and one of the things I say all the time to the people I teach - many of whom are acting teachers - is that an actor needs to make choices that make him present.
-
Everything that has happened to me is of value to me. As painful as certain things are, and have been, and were, there's a use for those things in my life and in my work.
-
I was offered the Gene Hackman role in 'The Poseidon Adventure' four times, and I turned it down four times. I didn't want to do that movie. I called it the upside down boat.
-
I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn't know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don't think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.
-
It's good to make people laugh.
-
No one tries to cry. You try not to cry. No one tries to laugh. You try not to laugh.
-
If I were a writer, the Pulitzer Prize would be important to me. This is my profession, so an Oscar is important.
-
You can have immediate regrets, but if you look at stuff and say, 'Things happen for a reason', there's a fatalistic thing about it. Something will happen that will justify it in some way.
-
The more complicated the character, the better I am. It's the one-dimensional crap that I had to do for years that drove me crazy.
-
They were like little palaces: all rococo or art deco. You'd walk in off those hot streets into a nice, air-cooled theater, and you'd spend all day watching Cagney or Jimmy Stewart. It cost all of 17 cents.
-
They made a fatal mistake in doing 'Psycho' again. Why do that? Why revisit something that stands for itself?
-
The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry.