Rachel Weisz Quotes

What is more important than the name is that people know that I really like acting, I enjoy it and I want people to know that I am serious. The name thing: I will always be L.L. Cool J.

You have to remember that for more than half my life - probably until my children were born - acting was everything to me. I was obsessed by it, and I spent so much time just trying to get to the point where I was being paid to do it. Literally, I spent every waking moment thinking about acting.

A huge part of acting in movies is appetite. You do your best work when you've got a lot of appetite and you really want to embrace something. When you get tired, you don't have that hunger.

I did a couple of movies when I was little. You have to be possessed to be an actress, and I was not possessed... It was not my life's passion.

I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.

You can act, or you can't. I'm sure a lot of people who are serious about acting would disagree, but I'm not really worried about them.

I'm beginning to think that I like the behind-the-scenes work as much as I do in front of the camera as I get a little bit older.

I've always been fascinated with everything behind the camera and in front.

I think everything within film and TV helps inform every other role, so it's definitely helped my acting, being on the other side of the camera, and it's just given me a whole new appreciation for how hard everybody in the crew works.

Being a director it's mean - digging deep in yourself as well. I think the deeper I understood the material and the script and the themes and the characters, I felt the more confident I was and the more I could bring to the movie. So I was lucky to have my actors because they were right there with me in the deep end.

I'm a natural behind the camera... My attentions are more toward behind the scenes, more toward creating, producing, and directing what's going on here... When I finally do pop in front of the lens, I'm genuinely glad and relieved to be there.

Acting is a creative process, and directing and music. I think creative people - and I take myself as a creative person and it doesn't mean you have to be an actor, a musician, or a painter - but I think if you are in a creative profession or a creative business you do have a heightened awareness.

If, while I'm painting, I distort or destroy a motif, it is not a planned or conscious act, but rather it has a different justification: I see the motif, the way I painted it, is somehow ugly or unbearable. Then I try to follow my feelings and make it attractive. And that means a process of painting, changing or destroying - for however long it takes - until I think it has improved. And I don't demand an explanation from myself as to why this is so.

I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who understand each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there's this great herd, the "herd of independent minds."

When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part. What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?

I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music.

When you add up the minutes you spend actually making a movie - the amount of time you spend actually doing your thing in front of a camera - it just isn't that much. But it's everything.

I literally think that if you're in this business, it has to be the only thing you can and want to do, because it's so hard. You have to be fully committed - and partially insane - to wake up every morning and be like, "I'm an actor." I have it in my blood. It's in every pore of my body. There's always something awesome about every project, even with the worst ones. I try to remind myself every time I think about complaining that there are way worse jobs than mine.

I don't mean to give performance art a bad name or anything; I think there are people that are legit. I think I just got frustrated painting - I love painting; I actually tried to be an artist, but it's sensitive, and then you have an object. And what do you do with that object? And then repeat and repeat, blah blah blah.

When you think about it there's never really been a realistic exposition of Hollywood, I mean - from the inside - showing Hollywood what it can do, what it has done, to people.

I really enjoyed it - being involved in watching rushes and playback [in "The Invisible Woman"]. Ralph [Fiennes] was very open to my input, I think knowing that he couldn't always be there 100 percent, that he had dual aims with directing and acting.

I think I've had pretty good experiences for the most part with the people who have directed my screenplays. It's more that I wanted to see what it would be like if I didn't have to collaborate with anybody, to have a sense of purity of the thing from beginning to end. I liked doing it. It's really different from writing. Directing is a more pragmatic experience, where you have to deal with the restrictions of time and money that force you to make certain decisions you don't have to make when you're writing.

I'm trying to avoid any more asshole roles, at least for a little bit. The main criteria for me when choosing a project is a good director. I just want to work with these guys that I admire because I do want to direct my own films one day, and I want to pick their brains to see what their process is like, and see what I can take from that.

When I get ready to do an album, that means I have something to say for the sake of words, and I listen back to all of the things I've been creating and pull things from out of the air to go with them. It's almost like I start creating the album before I even think about creating it.

Every time you try to make another movie, you never know what will come of it. I can't say it ever gets easier, but it is in it's own way gratifying. I think that because no one movie that you make ever quite satisfies you, you're always feeling, "Next time I can get it right."