Christoph Waltz Quotes

The crowd can be a little different in some places. For example, in Europe, people tend to be very respectful. They try not to make too much noise at inappropriate times. In other countries, people can be very still. Sometimes I'm not sure if a crowd is into it until the end, when they usually want me to do something crazy for the encore.

I do get a bit of a sense, just from e-mails some people send me, just a little sense of how people in different countries seem to respond differently to certain lines in a song.

Every crowd is different. But that's something that I enjoy, and you can feel it in the first few seconds when you walk out on stage. You know, how a crowd is.

I know two kinds of audiences only - one coughing, and one not coughing.

When you're onstage, you're acutely aware of the reaction of a particular group of people, because it's like a wave.

It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.

I've done so much theater, and yet I never had an experience like 'The Normal Heart.' We could feel the reaction of the audience every night. It was visceral.

In the Netherlands I read the first chapter of Exquisite Corpse to an audience that laughed in all the places I thought were funny - an experience I've never had in America!

When I hear people clapping at the wrong times, I think that's great. We have got a listener that's not used to going to - we have got a new listener.

Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.

When you are traveling in vaudeville, you experience so many different kinds of audiences, depending on what time of the week it is, how long the pubs have been open, and things like that.

When you're reinterpreting the same material eight shows a week, it's impossible to lock in the 'ideal' performance. Things that felt great in previews can feel forced three months in; jokes that got big laughs in the rehearsal room may suddenly fall flat in front of a paying audience.

The crowd is the crowd. You're gonna take them as an individual performer how you take them. The key is how do you learn from them. How do you use whatever is happening reaction-wise to get better.

I've worked in front of crowds of two hundred that sounded like a thousand, and I've worked in front of crowds of five thousand that sounded like two hundred. It really varies with the energy level with any given crowd on any given night.

There's no doubt that 'Lion' is an audience pleaser. I mean, I went to a lot of research screenings all over, in London and America and Australia, and the results were ridiculous, and the crowds were... they just loved the movie, so for me, my job is done.

My first experience of that was with my first movie which I did in India. And it was so different from other people. I find that "Oh my God." Every time the music is slow I feel that people are going to get up and go out. You get this nervousness. But, to my surprise, people starting singing the song even before it came in. They started singing along a week later, after release, which was very cool.

There's been (if you sort of scan the magazines) announcements of different performers that has come and tried to get the British audience to go crazy, simply by them entering the stage because they had a hit record. It just doesn't happen. That happens in America.

There's something perverse isn't there, if you're playing in front of 100,000 people and there's 2000 people down the front who don't like, you think: what is it that they don't like?

We're paid to care. That's what actors get their money for. But the main goal is not for the actors to be frustrated at the end of the show, but for the audience to be throwing their shoes at the television set. That's what we're trying for.

In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.

The weakness of cable news is that it chases its audience around. Your audience wants fast-paced, popular news. It needs real news. Cable news changes its stripes based on audience reaction. Viewers are reacting well to breaking news? You probably do more breaking news than you need to. The struggle is building something so that people will come to you, as opposed to constantly changing what you are because you're unsure of where the audience is.

A preacher who is too big for a little crowd would be too little for a big crowd.

I love having made a film and watching it when it affects audiences in a positive way. It was always fun for me to hide in the back of a theater and watch Tootsie with an audience and hear them laugh. And it's gratifying 20 years later to imagine that they still can find it amusing.

If I see someone not laughing, the first thing I'm thinking is, "OK, am I cursing too much? Am I doing a joke he doesn't understand? Is he resting?" Then he starts becoming my focal point. Once I see him laugh, I'm like, [snap] "All right, now I'm funny."

Entertain the people. Give them something they're not ready for, make them talk.