Francis Ford Coppola Quotes

For the actor, The Lee Strasberg Notes are an indispensable companion.

Almost everything I learned about being an actor came from those early years at the Actor's Studio.

I am not a method actor, though I studied for a year with Lee Strasburg.

I joined the Actors Studio and began to work with Lee Strasberg, and that changed my work.

I've dealt with a few method actors, and I don't know if should say this, but I think it's a bunch of nonsense. I think it's film acting and you just have to be on when the camera is rolling.

I was always drawn toward the Actor's Studio. I studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute when I first came to New York. One of my favorite teachers was one of Al [Pachino]'s teachers, a guy named Charlie Laughton, who was just a wonderful, wonderful man.

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.

The notion that acting is simply about intuitively responding to situations the way you feel couldn't be farther away from how I ask actors to work.

There are still actors who use emotional memory, affective memory, which was Lee Strasberg's emphasis, not his total emphasis. She taught everything at the Actor's Studio. But nevertheless, she felt that it impeded her.

I was a student of Sanford Meisner for three years at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and I studied with Lee Strasburg for five years and became a member of the Actors Studio. What I studied came right from the horse's mouth. My students have a lot to learn from me, and I am so eager to share it.

You know, I don't support esoteric approaches to acting.

I was a student of Stella Adler and then later Lee Strasberg, and they were into sensory work. At its best, acting is not about words - even when the words are important.

Acting is the only medium were people think they can just stand up and do it because they can say lines, but that is not so much the case. You have to study styles and techniques.

There's so much to learn about acting and performance in general... I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.

I trained as an actor with Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and Harold Clurman, and those guys set a very high bar.

I grew up the son of an acting teacher but I've never been really good at articulating what that process is. It was always a bit more internal.

As an actor the best thing you have is your imagination. You're not going to have all the experiences, but you draw on the things that you know. So I think you definitely use the things that you're familiar with to your advantage.

An actor definitely has to be in the past a well as the present; an actor must react to past experiences every minute, every second.

My problem with the traditional acting method was that I never understood what you were supposed to be thinking about when you're onstage.

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

When I was a younger actor, I was very immersed in it, very "method" and all that. Now, I don't give a hoot.

British acting is undoubtedly based in text, and American acting relies more on behavior. That's speaking very generally.

I was an original member of the Actors' Studio.

Having a guy on a microphone yelling lines at you is counter to a lot of acting techniques.

There's no such thing as The Method. The term 'method-acting' is so much nonsense. There are many methods, many techniques.