Andrew Haigh Quotes

I work very hard on motivating everything I do as an actor. Explosive moments have to be completely motivated; whether they're explosive comedy or explosive horror, they have to come organically out of a scene and an interaction with another actor.

You have to examine a scene on the page first. Then you get into the basics of acting: Who are you? Who are you talking to? How do you feel about that person?

I try to really focus on the actors I'm working with and kind of read and respond to their behavior.

When you write a script that you've felt in your soul for a long time, you can't ask the actors to go through the same emotions. You have to do part of the job to make things as easy as possible for them.

Each actor, every single time you work with an actor, you have to come up with the language that's going to serve them. And that's what allows them to give the performance that you want to nurture inside of them and what you think they're capable of giving.

As an actor, you can't play a flashback; you can't play someone's memory. You just have to play each circumstance as if it was real and understand that person's point of view.

Good directors give short and specific instructions to their actors.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

I don't think it's necessary to be an actor to get great performances out of an actor. But I do think it helps me as a director because I know what I like as an actor, and I try to get that to the actors who I'm working with.

It's kind of up to the actor to deconstruct the scene and deconstruct the character and figure out how to make it real. That's what I love about this job: It's sort of a puzzle each time, and figuring that out is sort the key, whether I'm playing a cop or a killer.

I demanded two weeks of rehearsal because to me as an actor, that's the most important time.

I approach directing from an actor's standpoint.

The trick to acting is not to show off, it's to think the thoughts of the character.

Scene study is isolated. I suppose it's interesting, but I don't think it really teaches you about a throughline. A throughline is something you feel when you do one scene followed by another followed by another.

As an actor, I had noticed very vividly that very few directors know how to direct actors because they haven't done it.

Every actor turns everything round to their character.

I don't worry too much about learning lines per se. The memorization is the easy part for me, usually. For me, it's more about working on the context, back story, intention, motivation, etc. Once that's in place, the lines come pretty naturally.

One of the things an actor tries to access is immediacy, so that you feel like you're experiencing it for the first time. But when you're playing a character who knows what's going to happen and can't stop himself to reacting although he knows he can't stop himself from reacting, there's a whole separate set of things to consider.

My strength is with actors. I think I'm good at working with them to get the best performances, at seeing what it is that they have and that the story needs.

As actors, we often look for the scene, big moments that say, 'This is why you have to do this role.'

It is always a pleasure to be directed by an actor because they know the scene from the actor's perspective, too. That's an advantage.

You make a decision whether you just work on the script and believe in every moment and pick out every moment, or if you sit down and memorize lines. Once you really dig into a script, learning lines becomes almost second nature.

I think my concerns are the same as every actor. Can I find this character and make it come to life properly?

I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because I'm recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because I'm concentrating on what the character is going through.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.