Viggo Mortensen Quotes
This basic thing I always do: 'What happened between the character's birth, and page one of the script?' Anything that's not in the story, I'll fill in the blanks.
Quotes to Explore
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Not to oversimplify it, somebody once said a good rule of thumb in interpreting a character is to find the good in the bad people that you portray and the bad in the good.
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We want a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax.
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My nursery school did a production of 'The Three Little Pigs.' I played the third pig. When the wolf knocked on my door, I refused to get up and answer it because, to me, he was knocking the wrong way. I just lay there, snoring away on stage, fully immersed in my character. My dad turned to my mom and said: 'Dustin Hoffman.'
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If you can make a character likable that's not very nice, that's the challenge of the job.
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Honestly, there are so many things about structuring a story for film and telling a story for film that are really different from doing radio.
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It just seemed like an unattainable dream to go down to Los Angeles and to land a professional working, acting gig on a show that you really love with a character you really connect with. That doesn't seem possible; that seems insane.
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But in action, one defies one's character.
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When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
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Anne Boleyn is an intriguing character. She seems to appeal to modern-day women in a very potent way. Because she was such an independently opinionated and spirited young woman, which at the time was unheard of.
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Where there is righteousness in the heart, there is beauty in the character. When there is beauty in the character, there is harmony in the home. When there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation. When there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world.
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I'm a rational person, and I'm not a method actor. You don't need to call me by my character's name while I'm not shooting.
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I think the Mama people remember is from 'Mama's Family.' She really turned into a pretty cool character. The sketches from the 'Burnett' show, if people are old enough to remember, were written by writers who all hated their mothers.
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As an actor, I'm my own worst critic, but after awhile, really, when you watch 'Moonrise Kingdom', it's such a fantastic film that you sort of get sucked into the story, and then you kind of forget about everything else.
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You know, I'm from the South, and I wasn't interested in perpetuating a stereotypical southern character.
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There's no story that breaks, including a five-alarm fire in Brooklyn, that I don't wish I were covering.
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I always wear the shoes of the character a week before going on set; the idea of just putting on a new pair of shoes on the first day of filming is just horrific.
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I learned a lot from Dick Wolf. I'll always remember playing that character because it was such a good character. It was great to be able to be a character like that for television. I think the thing that I'll bring from the whole experience, the whole 10 years, is I had never been interested in the television business before.
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Kabir Khan is that rare director who manages to merge Bollywood formula with a good story.
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There's always something more to be accomplished with a character. Theater is a human experience. There's nothing shellacked or finished off about it. I guess that's why it always draws me back.
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Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he, who is cruel to living creatures, cannot be a good man. Moreover, this compassion manifestly flows from the same source whence arise the virtues of justice and loving-kindness towards men.
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Smokey Robinson is one of my heroes as a singer and songwriter; a major influence on my own music from the very start.
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You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
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The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong.
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This basic thing I always do: 'What happened between the character's birth, and page one of the script?' Anything that's not in the story, I'll fill in the blanks.
