Atom Egoyan Quotes

The part that I felt most comfortable with going in was just working with actors and trying to make them feel comfortable and safe so they could find the performance. That part felt organic to me.

My job as a double was always to put [actors] at ease. My job was to make my character, or the actress that I was doubling, look as badass as possible by being there.

I think you have to be flexible above all as an actor; different characters have different demands, actors that you work with are different in their approach, or how you get along or don't get along with them.

Its very hard trying to talk to an actor about how they should deliver lines, or cut their hair, unless it comes from a place of a strong point of view.

The basic skill of an actor is, in fact, empathy, and that's maybe not a skill, it's a disposition. I am an assistant storyteller. I enjoy feeling useful to a team effort. It's my way of finding a use for myself, a utility in this world.

You want to give the director what they want, and you don't always know exactly how it goes, so you want to try it a few different ways. You have to be flexible; you have to be in collaboration with the director; you have to be versatile. But you also want to be protective of what you really believe in and how you feel it should be portrayed.

I used to need the character but as I've gotten older I need it less and less - I prefer to play some version of myself. To approach any acting job as me just being me.

I always try doing a different character for every film so it's not just changing one.

Sometimes you have to say the words exactly how they are on the page, but sometimes when you improv, it only helps to get across what's on the page, and I just love working with directors who allow that.

Not only is acting more than a part-time job, it's more than a full-time job. It's a full-time obsession.

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.

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, "No here, don't do that, go there."

When I'm acting, I'm in the director's hands. I'm very happy to be. I like to be focused on what I'm doing.

I've had the pleasure and the great luck to work with some incredible actors over the years and you have to observe and learn and take something from it and try and become better yourself.

What I really learned from Tim Burton is that it's important to have your own person in a role because you can't play a character unless there are elements of human behaviour that you yourself understand. I was really struck by how Tim Burton would like to sit and chat about you... or question things which then you had never thought about. It is a good thing to always step back a bit with things like that. But I try my damned hardest to learn something from everything I do.

I forget who said it, but someone said, your job as an actor is to communicate the most honest version of this character, and so the parts of you that you can use are obviously the easiest to access, because you live through them every day.

I was working with Peter Tolan, who was my writing partner on those two [Rescue Me and The Job], and he did The Larry Sanders Show with Garry Shandling, and he always said that the second season is better because you know the actors.

I try to build relationships with the actors, at least to some degree beforehand, whether it's phone calls because I'm from Seattle or all of us meeting in person at some point, which is ideal if at all possible before we get on set together.

I learned a lot from Clint [Eastwood], who's an extremely economic director. I learned a lot from Michael Winterbottom, who really gave a lot of trust in the actors and allowed them to live in the space instead of trying to manipulate and make it too set and too staged. Working with [Robert] De Niro taught me a lot of being an actors' director and what that is. I've learned a lot from pretty much everybody. Hopefully I've picked up something from everybody I've worked with.

I hear about actors being exterior actors and actors being instinctual actors and I always think it's crap. Anybody who knows anything about it knows that good actors do both - they do inside-outward and they do outside-inward. You can't not do both.

Being an actor opened doors for me to explore my emotions as different people and characters, and expand my own inner soul.

In film, other actors' performances really are not your concern. If the other actor isn't giving you what you want, act as though he were.

I think working with actors is a little bit how a chef would work with a potato or a piece of meat. You have to kind of have a look at the potato or the piece of meat and see what kind of possibilities are in the ingredient. I know I'm using the wrong metaphor. I think my job is to see what potato is there and from there, just work under their conditions.

My job as an actor is to serve the writing and help the author get his ideas across.

One of the greatest things I've learned, as an actor, was how to talk to actors.