Nicolas Cage Quotes

When actors are talking, they are servants of the dramatist. It is what they can show the audience when they are not talking that reveals the fine actor.

I would love to get great performances from actors as a director, because that's what I'm always looking for, a director that's going to help me go places I've never been before.

I'm always amazed when any actor can decipher my direction.

It's what I learn from the great actors that I work with. Stillness. That's all and that's the hardest thing.

I act according to the requirements of the character, and if I try to play the role, then I play it truthfully. In my daily life, I'm a laid-back, peaceful guy. I'm just doing my job to act.

I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules.

I think one of the things that people take for granted when they watch a film is the actors have to exhibit an extraordinary amount of force to block out the stuff that isn't a part of their reality. And when the audience sees it, they're seeing everything the actor isn't seeing.

I think I'm sort of method in a sense, and I enjoy, you know, trying to find that reality in fake emotion.

Most people when they see me cry for a shot, say, 'Wow, what a natural!' But I actually do cry and break down.

Good acting is confused with good dialogue delivery. Acting is about all about performance, and the way we interpret and understand the character that we bring alive onscreen.

It was very difficult acting. I feel it is a very tough job to portray someone else's character and to behave like that on screen.

You can't have the real thing on camera - that's the nature of cinema. When you see people like Daniel Day-Lewis and Ralph Fiennes screaming and hyperventilating, you're seeing the phoniest kind of bad acting. You may as well have a 'men at work' sign. It's not acting if you can see it.

You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.

Actors are magical people. They can take words you wrote and say them in a way that, although you thought the line was good when you wrote it, it's fantastic when it comes out of their mouth.

Lee Strasberg taught me different ways in which a scene can be approached so that it is perfect. Acting schools also open you up - you react differently to each scene. It makes you a very reactive person.

Some people say, 'Do you have any theories on acting?' And I say, well maybe: I think you can start with zero and end with zero. You don't have to go anywhere, you don't have to go for the result.

Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.

I have learned that acting is not about beauty.

As a filmmaker I find it much more rewarding to work with actors who are classically trained. It's about the work and only the work.

I'm very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.

Some actors get by with behaving, not acting. You've got to sell the effect. I act more in the 'Nightmare' movies because it's not like me. I'm acting, not reacting.

I do not use any set methods, not even The Method. The character after all is in the lines.

I want to break into the acting industry. It's something I have a great deal of respect for; it's a passion of mine. It's so amazing, the differences between acting and being an athlete, but the one commonality is they both evoke emotion in the viewer. And those emotions are real. So I think that's pretty cool.

What is important to me as an actor is that, even if I have to spread my arms, take my shirt off on a mountain top with my heroine in a chiffon sari, it still has to be me and my twist or my funny take on it.

As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.