Gabriel Byrne Quotes

I'd love to tell actors about all the things they don't need to worry about. Less is more. If you have it inside, you don't need to show too much. People pick up on things.

'English Vinglish' is simple; that's why people like it. The film has simplicity and sensitivity. There is no melodrama. Some things have been conveyed just through expressions and no lines.

I never feel the need to go out and make some grand statement that I'm dark and twisty and complicated, because I'm not that either. It's just not as simple as ponies and rainbows, though I do love ponies and rainbows.

I hope I'm able to achieve more on camera through stillness, through focus, through being quite careful to do less on every take, rather than more. So I'm reducing, rather than adding. Which hopefully is a good exercise. That's what I'd like to do.

A lot of people tend to chew up the scenery. I'm a firm believer in less is more, especially on the big screen.

A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true.

Extreme complication is contrary to art.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.

Minimal is the word I'd use to describe how I live and dress, and it's also how I sing. I'm not a big fan of overemoting.

Too many actors try to get too much out of scenes that they ought to be leaving alone, just doing them quickly and getting the hell out.

I'm an enemy of exposition. I feel there's no need to overstate.

I admire an actor that can do a lot with doing nothing really, for the most part. I like doing a lot by doing so little.

As an actor, what's interesting is what's hidden away beneath the surface. You want to be like a duck on a pond - very calm on the surface but paddling away like crazy underneath.

I just like to keep things small and subtle and authentic, and ground everything in reality. So that is something that I feel is my strength as a director and I try to achieve as an actor.

Basically, less is more when it comes to film.

One of the traditions of film acting is a sort of mumbled realism. Be minimal, and do less. 'Even less than that.'

So much of the art of film is to do less. To aspire to do less.

The less event and action there is in a scene the more I can enter into it.

The Truth never flaunted a sign.

Nothing is true, but that which is simple.

I do think that it's always okay to show too little. People will still be interested. So why show too much?

...it is simplicity that is difficult to make.

It's my job to try to communicate with as little showiness as possible. I was a really showy actor as a young man.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.