Barret Oliver Quotes

When you play a character, there are choices you have to make about the past, the present, the future, etc. You have to make those choices on your own a lot.

I really preferred the characters I could totally create by myself, because I always think of myself as an actor first.

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

I would like any type of character that I could be creative with and totally delve into.

I don't plan my roles or my films.

You have so much freedom as an actor in your character's choices, and I really learned to take advantage of that.

If you can write and create original characters, do your own show, develop your own material, it gives you more power than just waiting around to be hired.

Acting gives you freedom to express your thoughts.

When I am filming a movie, I think I tend to do what I want with my character.

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.

When you're acting, you can try your own ideas and be free.

I would love to just continue playing characters that break the mold. I like making interesting decisions when playing characters, so, taking something that would seem one way and then playing it a different way.

I'm an actor. I can do whatever I want. As an actor, not everything has to be the most obvious choice. And sometimes, the best thing you can do is to defy expectations.

I'd like to think that I don't have a stock character that I go to. I'm lucky in that when you get to initiate your own scene, you get to play whoever you want. That's really kind of cool, but all my characters are short. I look on the videotape, and I thought they were taller, but they're all 5'2".

When we did Cubist paintings, our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets followed our endeavour attentively but they never dictated it to us.

I think early on it's important to put that at the back of your mind and make your own choices. Sometimes you do pick the same choices, just as a matter of course - not because someone else did it first, but because it was the best choice to make. But any actor worth his salt makes something their own.

I want it to be more universal than that - like a painter doesn't have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.

I've always felt it's the directors purview to say what; it's the actor's purview to say how. It's not good for an actor to have the big picture in mind - it bollocks you up. An actor's purview is the tiny little... We measure our performance in seconds.

I felt that I really couldn't be creative with opera. You're supposed to sound this way here. You're supposed to crescendo here. You're supposed to do that. I had no sense of identity while singing that kind of music.

Darkwing Duck and Don Karnage are the most fun to do, because they're both probably the closest to me - I kinda improvise a lot of them, kinda ad lib.

The fun thing we get to do is mess around playing all sorts of different people. People that really existed, people that exist in a book - whom people love and have a specific idea of who they are, and you kind of have to work with that - or people that you can take a completely fresh look at.

It was seriously just a name. They didn’t tell you what to do. They didn’t tell you how they wanted the character to be - nothing. You went in to audition for this character name and that was it. When I started, before I came onto the set, I went to Gene Roddenberry and said: hey, what do you want from this guy? Who is he? And being as smart as he is, he said: don’t listen to what you’ve heard or read or seen in the past, nothing. Just make the character your own. And that’s what I did.

It's fun to play somebody who has no boundaries or rules. There's no book you can read on how to play a witch, so you just create a version. It's really great!

So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own.