Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Quotes

With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.

The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.

I think a lot of acting is about the removal of self-consciousness. The actor is going to be in front of a lot of people, and will naturally feel self-conscious. So a lot of the preparation for that is the removal of that idea. Like you embody or are connected to this character, therefore you can present this character in a way that eventually, when you come back to see it, you feel not exactly ashamed of.

As a young performer, I didn't know that you can have a great time playing someone in terrible crisis. The more you know it's not real, the deeper you can go into it. And the easier it is to let it go when it's done.

It's funny because, if you're not an actor, people always tend to say, 'How do you memorize all those lines? Is that really hard?' I'm always like, 'That's just a small part of it. I have to seek my craft and my emotions' - you know, all this gross, actor-y stuff.

I think that's how any actor would make their performance convincing: by bringing an element of themselves into the character.

I think, as an actor, you create things for your character that you think will make it more personal to you, because on the day, you want to make sure that you're truly there in the moment.

You have got to dig deep into your own spectrum while playing a character. If I am playing evil, believe me, I am bringing out the evil from within me.

When I watch people like Cate Blanchett act, I don't know what is going on in her life, you just get lost in her performance and that's what I hope to do as well.

When you act, it's better not to fake the emotion. It's better to find the emotion within yourself and your experiences, and see if you can bring that back to the surface, so that you can then literally hand it off to the character, and then let him run with it.

Learn your lines… plant your feet… look the other actor in the eye… say the words… mean them.

I think an actor can actually gather moments, memories and emotions for his next character. So, it's a constant work.

It's a little bit odd. The first time you do the play, you kind of throw yourself into it, trying to get the most out of all the individual moments. Then, a few hours later, you're still there, wondering what you could possibly do differently than what you just did a couple hours ago.

The actor must know that since he, himself, is the instrument, he must play on it to serve the character with the same effortless dexterity with which the violinist makes music on his. Just because he doesn't look like a violin is no reason to assume his techniques should be thought of as less difficult.

As an actor, you can't say, "I'm going to try to be cool at all cost when I do this," because that's the opposite of what you need to do as an actor.

In the movie, you have to decide as an actor how you are going to give a character presence. You can't really move, walk, and talk like yourself. This creates something so you have to find something "other".

All my roles are character roles. On the other hand, there are those people who have an inner...I think we all do the same thing. You can't get by on aura alone. That I know. Everyone has to dig in. Everyone has to do the same set of, "What is this about? What is this character doing?" Everybody from Spencer Tracy to Brad Pitt to Jeffrey Tambor.

A lot of times, you're not necessarily off the page because you haven't been able to take the time to prepare a character. It's very easy to find even great actors reading it more like a reading. Things aren't really coming alive yet, even though you know they will.

Singing in front of people. It's like having your heart beat outside of you.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete.

After you read the script, then you actually just have to be in the moment you're in, in order to make it believable. You can't give it away. You can't tip it off. For me, it's always about being truthful in the moment I'm in. Hopefully, being able to reveal what I'm feeling, you have to believe it.

You don't have to kill somebody to play a murderer. You have to read the script and interpret the character.

People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.

I don't like showing the technique. I don't like people who say, "Here, I'm going to act, but first I have to bounce off this wall." If you have to bounce off the wall, do it by yourself. Don't feature the technique. My old drama coach used to say, "Don't just do something, stand there." Gary Cooper wasn't afraid to do nothing.

I think I'm getting there, but it's very hard to perform at my absolute peak when an awful lot of people come just to make their presence known, when the lights go down and all you can hear is people screaming.