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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Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.
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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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I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn't good at it.
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The difference between Carter and Ted Kennedy: Carter has this vague religion which he believes in strongly, while Kennedy has this strong religion which he believes in vaguely.
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I think we underestimate the importance of kindness sometimes. We understand the power of just a little tiny bit of kindness. It could be the catalyst for something so important. Sometimes just a tiny little gesture or an acknowledgment can make all the difference in turning somebody's life around. I think it has a trickle down effect, when you pass on what you receive without even knowing it. We also underestimate our own power to make a difference with the decisions that we make, every day.
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It's connectivity that really makes the industrial Internet work: it's giving the right information at the right time to the right person or right machine to make the right decision.
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The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.
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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.
