William Hurt Quotes

Acting must be scaled down for the screen. A drawing room is a lot smaller than a theatre auditorium.

At Julliard, they don't teach you where to move your face for the camera, you know?

When you're on stage, you're playing to whoever is in the back of the room, and TV and film is so much more detailed and nuanced, but I think that's what I always wanted to do. As much as I love theater and musical theater and would love to do it again, I really love the subtleties of film and theater acting.

I really learned how to act on camera through 'Power Rangers' because I hadn't done a lot of film and TV.

I've worked with actors who treat the first two takes like rehearsals. And that's okay. If the camera is on you and we're doing a scene where I'm off camera, I'm treating that as a rehearsal.

Being a film actor is very different from a theatre actor.

It has been my experience that work on the screen clarifies stage portrayals and vice versa. You learn to make your face express more in making movies, and in working for the theater you have a sense of greater freedom.

The difference - the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.

The world of the stage and the performance on the stage usually does not tend to translate very well - it doesn't tend to hold very well - once cameras are on it; it's not like it's terrible or embarrassing or bad anything, but, I, as an actor, would perform a role differently for an audience than I would for just cameras.

It's a tough transition really for theater actors to adjust to television or film, and all of these years later, I still have a tendency to play it too big.

I think I'm becoming more relaxed in front of a camera. I suppose I'll always feel slightly more at home on stage. It's more of an actor's medium. You are your own editor, nobody else is choosing what is being seen of you.

Acting in the theatre is fun; acting in film is work.

Acting I never worried about, but it's so strange that on-camera work is so much more technical than theatre work, which I would have never thought in a million years.

For a movie actor, the biggest challenge on TV is the number of close-up shots.

Being an actor in TV or movies is different. A film or TV actor, if put in theatre, won't know certain dimensions, while a theatre actor won't know certain things when he comes before the camera. So I think a film actor can learn emoting from this theatre counterpart, while the theatre actor can learn about camera techniques from the film actor.

I've been doing theatre for years, but film acting has broadened my horizon.

Theater acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser

I've had plenty of lessons about film acting and theatre acting.

When I was doing 'All in the Family,' half the time, I was looking at where the cameras were, where were the other actors in the scene, what the audience was doing.

I consider myself a novice film actor.

No, I'm a theatrical, live performer or a movie performer.

I've worked with little kid actors before, and when they start crying or anything like that, it makes my job so easy, because you react. A little kid crying, there's not much else to do.

I've done films where we don't rehearse, and I've done films where we heavily rehearse. I like rehearsals.

I can't imagine anything more debilitating, anything more challenging, anything more thrilling than to get on a stage and do any kind of play. It is such a vulnerable place for any actor to be in.

My job when I'm acting in a movie is very limited to playing a role. I'm not evaluating somebody. I'm only evaluating them insofar as they're interacting with me, but I'm not evaluating their skill set and I don't watch the movies, so I'm not aware of the way they're putting things together.