Joaquin Phoenix Quotes

Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.

As an actor, you are in a unique position because you're not only memorizing dialogue but really embodying it. You naturally feel the rhythm of good writing.

When there's no technical problems, if you did the right casting, and the scene is well written, the actor will give you a strong performance with his intuition right from the start.

People think memorizing lines is hard, when that's the last thing you worry about. You get that done, and then you've got to worry about the internal stuff, which is the challenging part.

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.

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

The one thing for an actor that is complete death is if you're bored, because that boredom will show in your work.

What's beautiful about the actual acting class environment is that you can use it to push through everything: push your voice, push your inhibitions, push your fears, push your confidence, push your vulnerability, push your silences.

A lot of acting techniques are very self-oriented.

I know what my limitations are as an actor, but my strength is putting myself into a well-written part. When I get in trouble is when I have to fix it, or when I have to carry it on personality.

I run the Actor's Studio on the West Coast, and one of the things I say all the time to the people I teach - many of whom are acting teachers - is that an actor needs to make choices that make him present.

When you see bad acting, that's usually what it is - they're not listening to the other characters. It's always hard with first-time actors to get them in that moment where they are really listening to the other characters and reacting to the other characters.

People think acting is just memorizing lines and doing facial expressions. No it's about traveling along a path of discovery, intention and connection.

I was always under the impression that acting is an innate gift. One of the first things I heard them say at Koothu-P-Pattarai was that actors should realise the art of acting through their training.

It's always a mystery when you're going into a role - 'Here's your wife of 40 years and... action!' How do you create ease or chemistry or whatever is supposed to exist?

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.

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.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

Vary the pace... is one of the foundations of all good acting.

Drama school can't make you a brilliant actor, but you can do stuff for three years - you're not going to be fired. You should just go for it all, even the stuff you think is codswallop.

I will say nothing to an actor that cannot be translated into action.

An actor matures with experiences, and the more the emotions he/she has been through, the greater the intensity of performances.

I'm not going to get better as an actor working on bad stuff.

I think you can really tell a good actor if you can put a camera on them and they can just talk and emote and react and you don't have to keep cutting away from them, because they are the language and the behavior. It's all a tour-de-force performance.

The difference between working with actors that have put their time in the theater and just straight film and television actors is that you trust theater actors a lot more. You know that they're seriously more trained than anyone else because theater is the best place to grow as an actor.