Peter O'Toole Quotes

A way you can get really good abs in film is you get your makeup artist to paint shadows - faux washboard. But if you see me in a movie and I have great abs, it means I have a great body double.

The secret to film is that it's an illusion.

Hollywood was always heartbreak town, though most of the world fancied it to be Shangri-La, King Solomon's mines, and Fort Knox rolled into one big ball of 24-karat gold.

What I love about films is that you can see "King Kong" and you can be affected by it and then you realize that he was just this little guy when he made that fall.

Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is the truth 24 frames a second. I think cinema is lies 24 frames a second.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

I don't want to see the zipper in the back of the monster suit. Like everybody else who goes to the movies, I want to believe the monster is real.

Film and theater are about misdirection and making the audience see something. I find it interesting. One of the things we do in 'True Blood' is shoot all of our stunts in camera. Instead of doing some kind of visual effect, we try to make it happen.

Like when you go to a magic show and you know how they do the illusions. That's how I am when I watch any movies where they have people flying through the air.

Movies started out as an extension of a magic trick, so making a spectacle is part of the game.

When I was a little kid - and even still - I loved magic tricks. When I saw how movies got made - at least had a glimpse when I went on the Universal Studios tour with my grandfather, I remember feeling like this was another means by which I could do magic.

Film is a window to the real world but a lie that makes you believe the unbelievable.

Movie magic is movie magic and acting magic is acting magic.

In Hollywood, moviemaking used to be about escaping reality to go to the movies.

Doing 'Prometheus' was what you imagine being an actor is like when you're five. In a spacesuit, on another planet, getting killed by an alien. It was a real treat; it felt like being a part of movie history.

Movies are like magic tricks.

Well, the Empire State was about 40' high in the studio. King Kong was a little model about 2' high, and the scenery that he worked in was in proportion to his size.

Magic is really performing special effects live.

As long as you don't think about the whole big picture, producing 'Spider-Man' is a fantastic experience.

Our ethos for 'Now You See Me 2' was that everything in the movie at least had the potential to be done in real life, and I'd say over 90% of it was actually done in-camera with no CGI. Of course, movies like this are always going to be bound by the rules of Hollywood, being there's going to be enhancements of CGI.

Showbiz and churches are the same thing. You never saw 'The Wizard of Oz?'

The wonderful thing about cinema is you can bring a 3D world to life.

People always remark on how I'm not as tall as I look in film. I tell them about the time I saw Lassie on a studio lot, and she was this tiny scruffy dog. Film makes you larger than life.

The closest encounter I had with films in my childhood was sitting on the lap of my father at a shooting set, and he would say 'rain,' and it started raining, and then he would say 'song,' and people started dancing. I thought I was sitting on God's lap.