Julia Garner Quotes

You are preparing yourself for a scene, and the most important thing is to remain emotionally available and remain in the moment with your scene partner. You don't want to let your own self-consciousness block the flow of creativity that's coming out so that you can act and react, and play what the scene is all about.

If you're working opposite an actor who can act, then all you have to do is listen and respond.

It's sort of the most important thing for acting, is to listen to the person you're dealing with.

You need to become a good listener. As you're working, you hear someone else's lines and how you absorb them becomes your acting.

Sometimes a scene works and acting is the easiest thing in the world and you don't have to do much of anything - just enjoy yourself and listen to the other actor. When it doesn't work, then every actor has different ways of dealing with the impasse. Sometimes you use memories from the past. Whatever. It depends from job to job.

Actors usually respond to minor aspects of their own character or things that even feel disparate from themselves.

I don't like, and I've never been very good at, close-up shots. As soon as you have the camera right there in front of you, it feels like you're in a different reality from the person you are acting with; you lose any real connection with them.

I'm more interested in knowing my cues than my lines. If you know what your cues are, then you know what your reaction is going to be to them. Acting is about reacting, and if I can kind of purely react, that's easier for me.

The key to acting - from what little I know about that wonderful craft - is listening, and interacting with the other person in order to achieve magic. One way to do that is almost to provoke.

When you act with phenomenal actors, it makes your job much easier because all you have to do is react.

One of the things an actor tries to access is immediacy, so that you feel like you're experiencing it for the first time. But when you're playing a character who knows what's going to happen and can't stop himself to reacting although he knows he can't stop himself from reacting, there's a whole separate set of things to consider.

Actors are very demanding because they have nowhere to hide. If I write a scene, it doesn't turn out very well, I don't ever have to show it to anyone; when you turn the camera on, or when you walk on stage, they have to feel like what's happening is real.

When you see bad acting, that's usually what it is - they're not listening to the other characters. It's always hard with first-time actors to get them in that moment where they are really listening to the other characters and reacting to the other characters.

When I started out as an actor, I thought, Here's what I have to say; how shall I say it? I began to understand that what I do in the scene is not as important as what happens between me and the other person. And listening is what lets it happen. It's almost always the other person who causes you to say what you say next. You don't have to figure out how you'll say it. You have to listen so simply, so innocently, that the other person brings about a change in you that makes you say it and informs the way you say it.

I think back story can help guide your choices, but when you're playing a scene, you're not making choices; you're just intuitive.

With acting, I always feel conscious of what I'm doing.

As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.

When you're acting in a scene, you're focused on doing the scene. You can't break character and go, 'Oh my God, I love what you're doing!'

I think our sense as actors of what we've just done - whether or not it be in an audition - is usually really not connected to any truth. I'm always asking for more takes and more goes. I think I just need to shut up and listen.

The more and more I work with really great actors, the more it's about opening yourself up to what they bring.

Acting is reacting. You can't react if you're not paying attention, if you're not listening.

You can be in an acting class all you want, but you don't fully learn until you get off that stage and in front of a camera.

The actor already comes with emotions to the scene: fear, the fear of being in front of the camera. It is this fear that spurs the emotion of the scene. I too am afraid; I don't know exactly what I am searching for. On the set, we are all participating in this fear together.

The first time I thought I should be an actor was in school. I thought, 'At least this is something for which I won't have to study.' But I've realised that an actor needs to be constantly unsure about what he's doing and about what's going on around him. The moment you think you've nailed it, you're dead.

A good trick I learnt early on is not to immediately look at playback because once you know the shot, you can see when the camera is on you. It's best to stay 'in it' all the time, and just if it's on you, it's on you, and if it's not, it's not. It's the easiest way.