Martin Landau Quotes
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The fact that I wound up doing television and film was just a thing that happened, but I was trained for the theater, and what goes on in the theater has nothing to do with special effects.
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I'm not speaking, you know, egocentrically at all, but I do have a very wide range.
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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.
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I've got two daughters, and it's impossible for me to say one of them is a favorite.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The way a character sounds is so important to how you're going to play him.
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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.
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A lot of the bad guys I've played just haven't had much dimension to them.
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I create each character as an individual, coming from a certain place, sounding a certain way, having been introduced to things a certain way.
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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.
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I run the 'Actors Studio' on the West Cost. I'm artistic director of that.
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I've turned down a lot of roles. Some of them made stars out of the people. I have no regrets.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I always treat each take as a rehearsal for the next take. That way you can find stuff and keep adding and playing until they tell me to stop.
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No one tries to cry. You try not to cry. No one tries to laugh. You try not to laugh.
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If I were a writer, the Pulitzer Prize would be important to me. This is my profession, so an Oscar is important.
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I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and 'inevitability.' How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.
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In any age range, there are some limitations in terms of good, good parts.
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It's good to make people laugh.
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You can't perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it's part of your palette.