Steve Buscemi Quotes

The accent in England can change literally from street to street, and people have this sort of feudal tribalism whereby you can identify somebody's provenance by their voice.

I sound New York. I sound East Coast much more than a blonde person from L.A.

I was born in New Jersey, but it doesn't sound like I'm from a certain region.

I actually always try to not do a general American accent. I always try to give a region.

I'm originally from southern California, so I, like, say 'like', like, a lot. I've been trying to scrub any traces of Valley Girl from my speech since I moved to New York, but it's, like, totally way harder than anyone thinks, you know?

For a lot of people, and I'm one of them, where you are and who you're spending your time with greatly impacts your accent.

I was pretty nervous when I met Robert Kirkman. It's very strange to meet someone who created you. Andrea [ from The Walking Dead] is still very much alive and kicking, seven years into the comic book, so to meet Robert and be like, "Hi, I'm Andrea," I had to just hope that he was happy with the decision.

Snoopy didn't start off being a Beagle. It's just that 'beagle' is a funny word.

For Cider House Rules, I was doing a New England accent.

Every movie I work with the costume designer to see what feels like the character, not what Columbus would wear but what is right for the character. Outside of the armored truck standard issue security guard uniform, this guy is trying to make ends meet. He might have one pair of jeans, the same boot, maybe changes his shirt but he doesn't have a walk-in closet full of things, so I wanted something comfortable that felt like the character.

It's almost a work-shopping process to create the characters with the actors.

A character on a page has to feel real, and for me the greatest fun is if you could gender-swap the role.

As soon as you put an actor to a person who is real, that person comes to life through another person.

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

I like to make all my characters interesting. Be they male, female or creatures unknown.

I think the characters are supposed to be an open book, blank canvas.

I think as actors we need to close read scripts and we need to fully understand the intricacies of dialogue as well as the symbolisms of what the actor wears and what they hold in their hand because that only adds more layers to the character.

You spend your life training to be an actor, observing people's characteristics so that you can design characters around what you've seen.

[Jack Nash from The Andromeda Strain] was not in the original film, but he was kind of a Geraldo Rivera almost kind of reporter that had a drug addiction. We start the story in rehab, and then he gets the roots of the story. I loved him.

I went to Glenalmond and got the piss taken out of me for my Glasgow accent. Then I spent five years at this very posh school, came out sounding like Prince Charles, which you have to do in order to survive, and then I got called Lord Fauntleroy for the first six months at art school.

When I'm putting the character together I try to find music that I think fits the character.

I'm not the writer who says, "You have to say it exactly as I wrote it," because you don't get good work. You want somebody who's going to bring something interesting to it and really create a character with you. You see that with certain actors.

Something that has always attracted me to even taking on the occupation of actor is the idea that I could be lucky enough to portray different characterizations from different places in the world, whether it's speaking another language or taking on a dialect and building a history from where they were born. I was very attracted to that concept, in becoming an actor.

The language in New Mexico is very different. At first when you hear the speech here, you don't really know what to do with it, but then I just went with it, because as a writer as well as a translator I do believe that translated words are not different names for the same thing. They're different names for different things. I tried to stay as true as I could, so I used Ruben Cobos' dictionary of Southwestern Spanish, and when I went into Spanish I never assumed the word I would use would be the word a nuevomexicano would use.

When complicated characters aren't well drawn, they're boring.