Emma Stone Quotes

I'm always nervous about it. You know, somehow, without even knowing it, I try and recreate the idea of what it feels like to go in front of an audience every night when I'm making a film. And that similar type of pressure and excitement before a scene, or preparing for a movie, so...

It's very difficult to find the time or the money for people to organize rehearsals for some movies. It staggers me how little preparation often goes into these scenes which are difficult and complicated. You think, "God, it's crazy. I've never met this person before and here I am having to work at how to do a whole performance on the set." It was great to have a few days of just talking to Michael [Caine] and Daniel [Barber] and thinking about the characters and the relationship between them before we started shooting.

My schedule is completely different doing a play than it is doing a movie, and I actually think it's a much harder schedule because you've got to do it eight times a week and you've got to do it good eight times a week and with different kinds of audiences who are cold or drunk or tired, whatever it is.

You might have, as a character, 30 pages of dialogue a day if you're what they call a 'front-burner story.' So you go home, you learn your lines for the next day, you get up, you're there at 7 in the morning, you do a quick rehearsal, you're on camera, you might leave, you know, at 7 at night and start the whole thing over again.

I've had to make the transition from sweeping in for 15 minutes, doing my stuff and clearing out, to carrying a movie for the duration - in a dress.

In films you do a scene, you play around with it and unless you're doing a lot of reshooting, which no one has the luxury to do, you deal with the problem for a day and then you move on. On some level, it never allows you to go very deep into what performing is about.

When you're on an ensemble show and you're messing around with everybody every day and you're not in every scene, and then all of a sudden you're in every scene, it's rough.

Stage is the ultimate test; I like watching established screen actors on stage to see if they can really do it. But it's great to have a healthy mixture of the two. Film is so technical: there's something very particular about the relationship between you and the camera. It took a long time for me to get good on film.

I'm not the kind of actress that goes home with the character. I mean, you're thinking about the work or the next day's scenes, but not staying in character. But as a film goes on, you become more and more fragile, emotionally. And physically too, actually.

When you shoot a film, you have very little time to waste, and I try to go into the character as soon as possible and stay there as much as I can.

I never dreamed that shooting a film would be so hard. There was less regulation then of child actors' hours. Even the concept of acting confused me.

He's very alive in a scene. He's a very good actor to act with. Even though through most of the picture he's blind, there are many places early in the picture I got to be with him before he was blind. Like convincing him in the office to do the picture.

I kind of went into soap opera with 'General Hospital' in the '80s. It's like theater because every day it's a new script, which really doesn't have a beginning, middle or end like a play or a movie script. So you have to be on your toes and bring it every day. And you have to be spontaneous, which is really how I like to work.

When you do a play, you have all this time to rehearse and grow into the character. In television, even though you're waiting and waiting and waiting, once you're actually on set engaging in the scene with another actor, time is of the essence.

Preparation is really important for actors; they need to know who they are, where they're from, and the experiences up to the point that we make the film.

I have always felt that acting in a film is very challenging in itself. But when it comes to performing live, I think that is more challenging.

Once I got so worried because I had to hit my costar with a glass bottle that I began crying.

It's never the practice to shoot the scenes in the proper order. Sometimes you shoot the final scenes of a film before you've even started the beginning. So you get good at it because you have to sort of just eliminate the memories of something you've done as an actor, which you haven't done as the character yet. But it sometimes is a bit of a mind-f**k.

What drew me into making movies is trying to make characters that step off the screen.

I grew up on the stage, and there's no two ways about it: you only get one chance to do your bit.

I love theater - it's where every actor should begin, the core of acting. But I feel that there's something about film that's captivating; it takes you to another, and you get to really be so connected with it.

I'm not really attracted to action sequences, because my experience is that it's quite a slow process to shoot them, and often we're not involved as actors.

I don't know what the character is going to be. We sit down and we create a character, and all of the characters in all of my films are made like that.

Obviously, when you're in theater, you have to be in character. You have to prepare for the unexpected. You have to be able to react to things that don't necessarily happen every night, or aren't supposed to happen every night. And you have to react to it in character. In six months, 192 shows, those things did happen. And the experience of that, the ability to stay in character, I feel like I've learned a great deal.

The job's always the same. It involves helping to tell the story and creating an alloy between character and story that serves the film.