Joseph Fiennes Quotes

I'm finally watching 'Mad Men.' As a child of the '60s, I can't believe how old everything looks! I am the age of baby Eugene.

Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.

When you're young, you don't have any experience - you're charged up, but you're out of control. And if you're old and you're not charged up, then all you have is memories. But if you're charged and stimulated by what's going on around you, and you also have experience, you know what to appreciate and what to pass by.

It must be understood that every architecture is bound to its time and manifests itself only in vital tasks and through the materials of its age. It has never been otherwise.

Age does not matter if the matter does not age.

I'd like to play with a period piece. Playing a girl next door in 2010 is so different from playing one in 1950, the way you talk, walk, dress, relationships. It's really fun studying all that.

Setting a movie in an earlier age gives it a mythical quality.

Those old enough to write their memoirs should not comment on contemporary issues.

Sometimes when you're working on a period piece, there's this tendency to be nostalgic about the period and do everything superglamorous, which can end up looking cliche.

Now being 41 and looking back on my career... It became natural for me to revisit Inglewood and to revisit the coming-of-age movie, but not wanting it to feel like a period piece completely about nostalgia but wanting it to feel like something that was relevant today and also forward-looking.

I feel like when you perform in a period drama, it's so easy to transform yourself into someone else because the costumes are so different.

With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.

I'd always wanted to do costume drama, but period dramas often become very wooden. Just because they're born in the 1400s, all of a sudden people start losing their sense of humour or their personalities.

Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.

I'm always struck, when I play characters from previous centuries, how young they were when they did what they did. That's what I need to get used to - when I portrayed a Russian cavalry solider in 'War & Peace,' he was in his teens. When I do a period piece, that's the hardest thing for me to get my head around.

He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.

Actions of the last age are like almanacs of the last year.

There are so many things I'd like to do. I'd really like to be in a period piece that takes place in old New York or old Hollywood and wear those costumes and that makeup.

Take care of your friends. Because there will come a time when you'll be no good to anyone, and the only reason for people to talk to you will be sheer habit.

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.

One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?

I hate period films - and there are plenty of them - where they say, "Let's not do contemporary language because the audience won't understand it;" "let's not make the girls wear corsets, because it's not sexy" and all that sort of thing. Gradually it disintegrates into a no man's land: you don't really believe it's a period scene and it doesn't feel like it's now because it's not now. You don't feel it's quite real and you don't believe in it.

I kept saying I want to do an episode that's set in the past, how do we do a period episode of Black Mirror? And simultaneously there was another idea we were thinking about and the two things sort of gelled and became San Junipero.