Actors Quotes
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If you say actors have a social responsibility to do things, you are right, in a way. It's a wishful decision. But if it's done out of force, I don't think it will accomplish anything. Everybody starts counting how much work they have done and see if they have done their due for the week. That is not social service. You need to go way beyond that.
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I was able to capture on film things the actors didn't even know they were doing.
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I'm a perfectionist, so doing a high quality, high caliber television show with great actors makes me feel like there's this whole world of television that I've never experienced.
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They say God looks after kids and idiots, and I think actors are probably a combination of the two.
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I love working with actors. That's what the set really is, for me. It's my time with the actors.
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I try to do the same thing when I'm with young actors who are new and unsure. I try to do the same thing for them that I saw Laurence Fishburne and Angela Dasset do for all of us on Boyz n the Hood.
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I'm not the writer who says, "You have to say it exactly as I wrote it," because you don't get good work. You want somebody who's going to bring something interesting to it and really create a character with you. You see that with certain actors.
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My feeling is that in the purest form, an actor is a service to the people. It's democratic in its purest form. That's what an actor is. If he or she isn't that, then there is no purpose in doing it. They're like priests.
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The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies.
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All the time, as an actor, you want to be asking what's next and where things are going. If you're not asking those questions, you're not growing.
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There are actors that come in and do a fight sequence, but when they have to fall on the ground or take a tag to the belly a bit too hard, they're shocked at how real it is.
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I have great admiration for athletes. They are just like actors in a lot of ways. They have tremendous pressures and conflicts. They have to compete, and they can't stay home just because they have a head cold.
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You should always challenge yourself, as an actor, to find the connection between you and the character.
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I started acting when I was 13 years old and I feel like I really admire actors who are these kind of amazing shape-changing people, that they almost can turn themselves into other people.
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Anyone can do theater, even actors. And theater can be done everywhere. Even in a theater.
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I just wanted to try directing, and the best way was to write the material, so I was imbued with its origins when I was dealing with the actors.
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the one thing I've observed over the years is the best way to get an actor to not want to play a certain role is to offer it to them. That makes them say, "Well, maybe it's not that good. These guys don't want me to do this..."
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I'm very used to working with first time actors - you can just look back at 'E.T.' with Drew Barrymore, and Christian Bale from 'Empire of the Sun,' who'd never made a movie before.
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I loved the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and the Lion and you could kind of see the actors' faces in them. It wasn't an entirely new face sculpted around them. What made those characters so human and appealing to me was seeing those great actors underneath there. They weren't lost behind a bunch of appliances.
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I always felt that if I was going to do a movie, I wanted it to be authentic.
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If I work with a bad actor, my reaction is to immediately become worse than they are.
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I don't want to take shots at professional actors, because obviously the great ones are great. But I do think that given the kind of stories I've been telling in my films, it's hard for me to imagine how professional actors would have done better. And it's easy for me to imagine how they would have done worse. Because I think a lot of what an actor is trained to do and a lot of what an actor's instincts point toward is clarification, is always making it clear what's happening in the story, how the character fits into the scene, what the character wants.
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When I was in New York, I was making a living. We had a summer house and a car that I could put in a garage. That's something for a stage actor.
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Michael Bates was a very funny actor; he'd served in India, could speak Urdu, and had great comic timing.
