Sanjay Leela Bhansali Quotes

I never act my characters - I am them.

I think substitution is a huge part of acting, but I don't personalise my work that much.

Actors pull from their own experiences to bring reality to the characters. I wouldn't want to play someone who's a lot like me. There would be no turning it on or off.

Some actors can distance themselves from the parts they play, but I fall into the category who use bits of themselves.

When you see my performances, even people that you might have known, like Nicky Barnes in 'American Gangster,' you have to get over the fact that I look like Cuba Gooding, Jr. But once you find truth in the performance, if I'm doing my job right, you believe everything.

I think, for every actor, the most challenging part of playing a character, specially a real-life character, is to convince yourself that you are the character.

When I work with a character like Valjean on stage, I get totally absorbed in that man. I become that man. But there's always, outside of that, the third eye, which watches what you're doing. And you can say to yourself, 'I'm crying well' or 'I'm being angry well.' But there's always that element there, and it never stops.

'Heirs' became an emotional experience for me. I had a hard time bringing out my emotions in the series. I used all my physical and emotional energy to bring out all that acting.

I never improvise. I create the character and transform into it.

I have a very schoolish approach to acting. I like to do my homework, know more about the character, and study it. It's all about the craft.

As an actor, I believe that acting is actually behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

If you're going to play a brain surgeon, you just have to learn how to say the words. You don't have to go and learn how to cut open somebody's scalp. I think acting is acting. Being is something else.

Acting became important. It became an art that belonged to the actor, not to the director or producer, or the man whose money had bought the studio. It was an art that transformed you into somebody else, that increased your life and mind. I had always loved acting and tried hard to learn it. But with Michael Chekhov, acting became more than a profession to me. It became a sort of religion.

I always like to try to bring whatever I can to what is on the page, so I like to find as much dimension as I can, in each role.

When it comes to acting, people talk about the suspension of disbelief that you ask of the audience. Before that starts, you have to, as an actor, suspend your own disbelief.

When I first was offered the role on Rise [of the Planet of the Apes], I always played Caesar as a human being within ape skin.

It's fashionable for modern actors to talk about getting 'inside' a character. But you can't get to the inside without getting the outside right first.

It's like they talk about how American actors have the method and English actors just kind of switch views faster. And John [Hurt] is telling me the story as he's sitting in that witness chair, and they're putting the final touches of makeup on. And he goes, "Hold on a second," to stop his story so he can do the take. And he does this incredible take. They go, "Cut." And then immediately John goes, "Anyways, so Alec, he's playing the chess." And I'm just going, "Holy crap." You get whiplash from those kinds of quick turns!

When you take on the idea of playing someone like Jimmy Bulger, it's a radically different process because you're going into make-up. The only way you can do it is to come out of make-up looking like the guy. If you don't look like the guy, it's going to bug you, all day.

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world. When I'm not at my desk, the rest of the time, I try to stay in that character and see the world the way that character would It's almost like method acting in a way — keeping the character close the way the actor keeps a script close and always tries to be in character.

As an actor playing a character, I can't come in with my judgement, or else I can't play it honestly. My judgement has to be reserved for later.

The point of acting is to hide yourself and get lost in character. To play the same character in eighteen movies would be defeating the purpose I believe so I try to keep a little bit of diversity.

I'm not an actor who consciously accesses bits of my life, in order to play parts. Obviously, you don't need to have been a father to play one, otherwise everyone who's been a father would be able to act.

I'm not that complicated as an actor. I have a formula in which I work, yeah. But not like Sean Penn does. Sean is one of the few actors I know who can work like that, actually becoming the character he is playing, and get consistent results. I don't believe you can ever be someone else. You manifest different levels of your own personality to come up with a character.

It's our job as actors to make it look like it's not manufactured. If you have two actors who understand their characters - and therefore what they are trying to portray - then all they need to do is be the characters and there's a chemistry there.