Lance Henriksen Quotes
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My feeling about all films and all television is that it's an adventure. That's the way I have to look at it. Because you don't know what the climate of the circumstance is going to be. It could be very good. It could be very mediocre. It could be very bad. You don't know. But I've been doing it long enough now to know that it's an adventure. That's what it's all about.
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You know something, if you're not acting, you're not an actor - you've gotta work. No way around it.
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If I would had been born years earlier, I would have been in all the Westerns. It's just the way that the industry goes. But now, we are in an age of a lot of different kinds of fears, and you have the science fiction and horror genres doing our morality plays the same way that they would have done in Westerns. I absolutely accept it. In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.
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The only one that I think I could beat, if my life depended on it, would be the Predator. If it was in my territory, in my domain, with the guns that I've got, I think I could hurt him pretty bad. That's the only one, though. When you get into metaphysical creatures, they don't play fair.
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Corporate nationalism to me is a little bit like what would have happened if Hitler had won. It's scary stuff. It's totalitarianism in a different from, under a different flavour.
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Theres nothing more fierce than the female, like the momma lion. Believe me, my wife is a good example.
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Charles Bean is a brilliant director. I come in with an idea and try to do it, but I fall on my face. And then, he says, 'Wait a minute, there was a little moment in there. Let's try that moment and expand in that direction.'
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The thing I hate most in acting is asking permission to do things. What you really want to do is say, 'This is my need; this is what's going to get me further; this is what's going to be alive. I don't ever say, 'Do you mind if...?' I just come in and do it.
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I'm a good guy. I love playing bad guys, but good guys that have a good thing going on, I like that, too. I don't like passive good guys.
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Growing up, I think I always had a sense of art: a sense that there was poetry in the world. I didn't know where I was going to find it. I didn't know where I was going to fit in, that was for sure. But I kept moving forward. There wasn't a future in anything other than movement.
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My feeling is, I do a lot of low-budget films. I don't do low-budget acting. I have no interest in just goofballing my way through, thinking, 'Ah, no one's ever going to see this anyway.'
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I always wanted to be an actor, even when I was a little kid. When I used to run away from home, I'd go to movies and sit all night watching Kirk Douglas. When I was 16, I tried getting into the Actors Studio, and they told me to get lost. I said 'I'll come back when I'm a man,' and I came back when I was 30.
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I really like playing good guys, of course. Although, people make mistakes in their lives, and you could say that the mistakes make us who we are, by how we respond to them. I just don't want to play boring good guys, but I don't have that problem, anyway.
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Because I've done a lot of theater, I know what power is and how megalomaniacs are, since I've certainly played some.
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You do your work as fully as you can, and the ones who hear the sound join in.
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I'm not Tom Cruise. I don't have to look that good. I'm always going to have a problem because I'm thought of as someone edgy, but I'm not. I'm a cupcake.
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You can't do every movie - although I do a lot of them - and the thing I'm longing to do is... it's not that I think I'm funny... but I long to do a situation comedy.
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In the late 1960s, I ended up in Telluride, Colorado. It wasn't like the country club that it is now. It was very raw. Skiing was there, but snowboarders have now entirely overrun it.
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When I do a horror or a fantasy film it all boils down to something in the script that surprises me. It could be a big thing or a small moment. If it's there I'll do it.
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But to this day - I'm very literate now, I love to read, I read constantly - words don't resonate the way they do to a person with a formal education. They're like a maze, a puzzle that has to be opened up.
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I attribute that to the generosity of people that are in the entertainment business because they are all struggling. All roads seem to come to acting, for certain kinds of people that have a reason for being there. They want to be seen and heard, but there's more to it than that. There's a kindred spirit of struggling to find out, "What is this thing? What are we?" It's those eternal questions. But, in the meanwhile, I've met some wonderful people doing this.
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I liked 'Scream of the Banshee' because it was a real challenge. I thought, 'How am I going to pull off this character?' But, I also thought, 'Oh, man, I'm going to go for it.' He's got all the defects of character that an actor loves to play. So, I had a really great time.
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I've always known from the beginning of my acting career that you only get an acting job if you've got something to learn about it. If you don't do it well, you'll be condemned to doing the same role over and over and over again. If you do it mediocre, you'll have to do it again.
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I'm pretty slapstick in my life but nobody sees that. You get typecast. I'm from New York and I have a sh*t-detector that's outspoken. I'm very streetwise and the producers detect that. So they get me on a movie and kill me. I go into their offices and I'm sure when I leave they say, 'You know, he'd be great to kill'. I've been killed every way you can imagine.