Paul Greengrass Quotes

The roles I'm interested in or have been interested in, you know, it's going to get down to conflict. Drama is conflict - conflict of interests.

Characterization is integral to the theatrical experience.

Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy.

Theater is something that as a performance artist you have to hate.

I like a drama.

Actors are the most important. Performance is what matters. Nothing matters more than the actors; they have to perform. No one else can give life to the characters. Audiences must believe the characters as real and the moments as real.

Performing is just standing up there and doing something. Performance takes on an edge to it. It has a more dramatic context.

Action is drama. If we cannot make the audience laugh, smile or cry with us, we are not actors.

Acting takes so much energy.

I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that!

I know from teaching that actors want to act. Even the subtlest actors can do a little too much.

The camera lens or the television camera is still just a proscenium arch. And as a great old character actor once said to me, wherever you're acting, you reach up and take hold of the proscenium arch, and you pull it down around your shoulders.

Acting is a mysterious process.

It was always theater for me. But part of that came out of the fact that I was always acting out as a kid. I was the kid who didn't play well with others.

And when I go to see plays, I marvel at how people can do that. I've done it all my life, but I still find it mystical.

As soon as you get two actors in a room and they're locking eyes, they're doing a scene.

I am always more interested in performance and character depiction, and my direction says as much.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

Olivier said that drama is an affair of the heart, or it's nothing, and he was right.

In the end, it's acting, it's not real. But every director will tell you that you have to create conditions that create tension, because tension is what makes drama feel real.

Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.

Theater people say you are either a comedian or a tragedian, and I'm a tragedian. And the vexing, dark characters, the ones where I don't understand their pain or their anguish, they are the characters that appeal to me.

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

I think good acting is always character acting.

What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.