Sibel Kekilli Quotes

To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

You try, as an actor, to wear a mask; you're serving a story.

I try to construct some kind of backstory for my character so that I have an idea of the life of that character - not just from the moment when the scene starts, but from before.

Whenever you have a role where you don't get to know anything about the character, you have to invent it yourself. You have to feel like it came from somewhere.

You're always trying to find common ground with whatever you do, but you want to not be thinking about yourself when you're performing a play. The job is getting yourself out of the way and letting the character go about the scenes.

In 'There Will Be Blood,' my character was someone who was an actor himself almost. He had a rehearsed quality about him. He was a performance artist in a way.

For actors, you've gotta sometimes fill in your backstory.

Being an actor myself I realize that all actors believe they are qualified to play any role. If you showed me a script with a black woman character I would tell you that I could do it. That is what we do. We act as if we are someone else.

As an actor, one's role is very much to respond and react to the situation within the context of the character and his world.

I find it easier to play someone who is so far from me because you create someone - you build this person based on the story and the script, with the director.

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

When you are developing a character you have to bring so much of yourself to the role.

When I get a role, I try to delve as deeply as possible into the character.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

You have to find out how to become the character.

If you do a scene and you really like a character in it or a premise in it to write it down and to work on it so that you can have five or six characters that you can pull out in an audition.

When you have a book as material as it is, it's a lot easier to create a character because you have so many resources to draw upon when acting.

If I were to play somebody who ran a fish and chip shop, I would not work in a fish and chip shop for three months. Staring at chips is not going to help me in my performance.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

Part of an actor's job is to draw up a back story.

If you have a very good concept of your character, you can snap into it.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

Any sort of role requires a certain amount of research and embodiment of the character and psychological investigation.