Martin Landau Quotes
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I've worked with a lot of wooden actors in my day, but Pinocchio is the best.
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The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry.
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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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With 'Avatar,' you're beginning to see the need for less and less actors and less of an appreciation for live acting.
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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.
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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 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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A lot of the time with an independent production, you go onto the set, and you rehearse it in front of the crew, and at that point, the cinematographer takes over. You start accommodating the camera instead of the camera accommodating you.
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Ageism is something that does exist.
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I studied with Strasberg, Elia Kazan. They raised the bar. They weren't easy to please, and they made you achieve the best you could do. That's what a teacher does: he infuses you with passion for something.
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The way a character sounds is so important to how you're going to play him.
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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'm not speaking, you know, egocentrically at all, but I do have a very wide range.
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They made a fatal mistake in doing 'Psycho' again. Why do that? Why revisit something that stands for itself?
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To really have craft, you must be able to repeat something as one has to do in films.
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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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I did a picture called 'Lovely, Still' with Ellen Burstyn, We screened it to the AARP people in Las Vegas, 2000 of them. We got a standing ovation from people who couldn't stand.
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How a character hides his feelings tells us something about him.
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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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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 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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As a Jew, there's a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It's amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There's a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.
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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.
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My mantra is 'stay perpendicular.' Horizontal is not as good.