Gina Prince-Bythewood Quotes

I've never liked watching real-life couples play couples onscreen or onstage. It takes me out of the story.

If the audience sees and feels things are real, then they buy it.

Actors who are lovers in real life are often incapable if playing the part of lovers to an audience. It is equally true that sympathy between actors who are not lovers may create a temporary emotion that is perfectly sincere.

You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.

I think if you work as an actress and are supposed as a character to be in love with some actor, then to some extent you do have to be in love with him.

That's probably the biggest secret of acting: If the actor believes it themselves, they can make you believe it.

The film depends on the audience's belief in this relationship.

You have to suspend disbelief a little bit to buy into your situation and to the story and to how the character will react. You have to tweak your credibility a little bit, is basically what it comes down to.

I think that's how any actor would make their performance convincing: by bringing an element of themselves into the character.

I've never been that comfortable with the acting thing. It's difficult for me to separate what's really going on. If there's kissing, that's kissing. I'm not acting; I don't know how.

If the actor believes in the moment, the audience believes in it, too.

It's definitely a difficult thing to capture and I mean, I've seen a ton of movies where I've believed the couple and I've seen a ton of movies where I have not believed them at all. Unfortunately, as an audience member, you check out if you don't believe them.

If your character is just out there acting a fool, viewers are gonna say, 'Why am I watching this?' But if he's whispering, 'I don't really want to die,' there's a level of vulnerability cemented in these bad characters.

I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

It would upset me if someone watching a show was thinking about me, Milo, as an individual at the supermarket or at a concert, wherever, and they're not thinking about what the character is experiencing.

If I can get the audience to connect with the characters emotionally - and they love who they are, they love the larger-than-life situation that they're in, but most of all get the audience invested in the characters - then I always feel like I can sort of put them in the most outrageous circumstances, and the audience is okay to go with that.

A lot of the time, when I watch actors now, I think, 'I don't believe you.'

In acting, you have to fool yourself - you mess with yourself into believing things.

I want to be in a more natural state while doing acting.

Something that 'Game of Thrones' always does successfully is that action sequences are never just action sequences. There's always a point of view, and you're always identifying with one person or one group of people.

When you're portraying someone, whether they're real or fictional, you have to find some kind of hook where it feels real to you because if you don't believe it yourself, then no one else is going to believe it.

One cannot forget that show business also deals with humans. Everything is not so superficial that this is rigged or planned. Sometimes people do fall in love with each other because they spend a lot of time on the sets so much so the set becomes your first home, and your actual home becomes your second home.

Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail. We try to make players forget they're playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.

I only cast the actors and actresses I fall in love with - truly having an emotion for them, an anticipation and enthusiasm when seeing them - and I believe that my emotional confidence in them blends into chemistry. It's always been like that, and I hope I won't be wrong in the future.