John Cameron Mitchell Quotes

John Doyle just knows how to feed actors, and what comes out of us, good, bad, right, wrong, doesn't matter. There's no fear or censure. He opens up the creative goo and all of the actor vessel stuff. He knows how to do it. It's just incredible.

I like to let the actors work the way they want to.

Sometimes what you lose in the time it takes to let an actor do something that you don't like as a director, you gain in not shutting them down creatively by telling them their idea sucks.

For example I don't work with William Hurt the same way that I will work with Viggo. They're different guys and they work in different ways. So a good sensitive director has his general style and technique and personality that he uses but you don't impose that on the actors.

A lot of what I think I do as a director is try to give everything over to the actor. So I disappear.

It's important that the actor doesn't feel like they're working in a vacuum. If the actor is told, 'Oh, it's a secret; just play it this way or that way,' it's a bit patronising. I think you have to bring the actor into your thinking and explain things.

[ Gareth Edwards] never wanted to force anything that wasn't true. He's very much an actor's director, and it was loose.

Having seen Justin's work on Bleak House, I knew that he'd be incredibly well prepared and interesting stylistically for this and that was definitely the case. It's very liberating for actors - and I can only speak for myself here - but he creates a very loose environment and he's a great collaborator.

The part that I felt most comfortable with going in was just working with actors and trying to make them feel comfortable and safe so they could find the performance. That part felt organic to me.

Trust your actors. That's why I work with the same actors time and time again. I encourage them to change the dialogue to achieve one thing: keep the characters honest.

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, "No here, don't do that, go there."

Acting to me is a very organic art form and you just go and do it. And I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed. Let me bring in what I want to bring in, and if something's wrong, just tell me about it and I'll make some corrections or adjustments. And that's what I do.

I try to always be open to what the actors want to try. I don't storyboard and try to be intuitive and open on the day of filming.

You work with each individual actor as you perceive their needs to be. It's something that you've figured out in the weeks of pre-production.

An actor who's a control freak, that doesn't work. We have to be malleable. We cannot come in and try to control or dominate.

The audience is not your boss. They are your collaborators and when you collaborate with someone you don't have to listen to everything they think or say.

There's things that I can do as an actor that I couldn't do in any other form of life and I've got a strange personality. But film requires strange people, so I've got a nice comfy home.

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.

If you feel safe then you can go wherever you want to go as an actor.

Casting is everything. Getting the person that you imagined is this character and then seeing what they bring to it.That's why you hire them, so why tell somebody first what it is you want? I'm more curious to see what they bring to it and then be inspired by it and say: "OK, what if you tried this?" or "What would happen if ... ?"

I've always wanted to be an actor that explores different genres and different characters.

If no one on the movie has met me before or knows me, that's the easiest. I don't do a lot of things that don't relate to being the person. I will try to keep it going for my other actors. I want them to do the least amount of pretending as possible.

When you're playing a character, you don't really want to have an opinion about where you're going to end up. Otherwise, you can't really stay in the moment and in your character.

With actors, normally I don't like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this.

I don't know of an actor that the Coen brothers would come to and say, "Hey, I've got a movie for you to be in, if you want to do it," that would say, "No." That's the truth.