Asif Kapadia Quotes

I love working with the actors eye-to-eye. I think something gets lost in translation, not only through a monitor, but when you leave the area where the actual scene is taking place.

I like to give my actors a lot of room.

When you're supposed to be close and friends in the film, the moment you're talking as friends off the set, it makes it that much better when you're filming.

I know there are people who can direct sitting down away from it all at a video monitor. But I can't do that.

I like collaborating with actors. I love finding that moment where it all comes together.

I'm used to working with a rehearsal process and your body. It's a different thing to just be a voice. It's liberating, on one hand, because you get to show up in sweatpants and with Doritos on your fingers, but on the other hand, it's limiting because it's just your voice.

As a director, what matters is how you penetrate the soul of the person in front of the camera and let the actor blur the boundaries between the character and the person themselves. In order to achieve that, I try to make people feel at ease, to be mindless of problems and be skinless and give everything to the camera.

I have always been a director's actress.

Acting is really a give-and-take; it's a dance.

I don't even consider directing Burt. I just say, 'Hey, Burt, the camera's here. Read the joke and let's get onto the next shot.'

It's tough to do a romantic scene with someone you don't like. I have been lucky so far.

If the actor believes in the moment, the audience believes in it, too.

A lot of really good actors are able to go straight from life to their work. They don't treat it as something that's an unattainable, weird thing that they have to aspire to and reach for in a scene.

I always like being a director in terms of giving acting notes and punching up on the fly.

No, I like you alive and warm and wiggling.

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.

Hands learn more than minds do, hands learn how to hold other hands.

There are directors, and I think this is true of all directors, it would be true if I was a director - If the actor didn't want to do what I was suggesting, I would let him do it his way, and then I would say to him, "Just give me one where you do what the director wants", and that, of course, is the take that's used.

I don't know how much time passes with us just lying there, just feeling that the other is really there, really true, really alive, feeling the safety of him, his weight against mine, the roughness of his fingers touching my face, his warmth and his smell and the dustiness of his clothes, and we barely speak.

I like coming up with these spectacular extravaganzas that will, hopefully, totally blow people away. But I also like the intimacy of stopping it all and sitting at the edge of the stage and connecting with individual people in the audience.

Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine

The musician and the listener. If this is love between two strangers watching each other from afar, that rough, burning moment when you rush in and kiss is the show.

Once I'm performing the show, I think that hour show has a certain intimacy with our audience. And that intimacy is through the lens and the live audience is a witness to that, whereas the audience at home is actually the object of my efforts.

Actors don't like to read what they're supposed to do.

I needed to see you. And touch you. And just... know