Sandra Bullock Quotes

The first thing, the main thing, about how I work is I need to understand the character.

Personally, I prefer to play against the look: If a character appears particularly unhinged, with makeup running down her face, I like to play her as if she has it together. I think that juxtaposition makes it so much more interesting.

I don't see any difference in the craft of acting, in film or television. It's absolutely the same. It's different storytelling, playing a character over multiple hours, as opposed to two.

Well, you put a little piece of yourself into every character that you do. Even if you're playing some psychotic person, which of course I'm not, some part of you is in that character and it's hopefully believable. I always come back to the fact that my own instinct is better than something I build in my mind.

It's fashionable for modern actors to talk about getting 'inside' a character. But you can't get to the inside without getting the outside right first.

The process of acting is no different [playing human or ape]. You're embodying the character. You're creating the psychology and the physicality. You're living the moment.

What I do is to collaborate with each actor and work one-on-one to create a character. And that is a matter of huge complexity and is a combination of a great deal of discussion and a lot of practical work. It involves a lot of consideration for the real people out there, and all kinds of sources of real people. The result is the character. But I'm not supposed to talk about what it is we do, because it's nobody's business.

I find that if I hold your hand, it transfers an energy first. I have a sense of how you feel. That's important to me trying to become another person. I have a lot pressure to bring a character to life in any kind of real sense.

As an actor, you can have your own backstory and prepare all the details that you need to know for your character.

Improv is more than just spitting out a bunch of funny stuff that's unrelated to the material. You have to stay in character, you have to react and respond as the character you're trying to play. You have to service the story, and I think improv training has helped with my listening, responding, and my audition technique. It's sounds so silly, but it's true. Because not only do you improvise during the audition, but once you get the part, they'll say, "Throw away everything. Just improv this scene. Do whatever you want." Someone could panic if they're not used to doing something like that.

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.

I'm an actor. I'm trying to be the character and do what they're doing.

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world. When I'm not at my desk, the rest of the time, I try to stay in that character and see the world the way that character would It's almost like method acting in a way — keeping the character close the way the actor keeps a script close and always tries to be in character.

If you never fall in love with your character, you'll never be able to do that character justice. No matter who it is, no matter what the character does, you have to find the reason for it. Everyone's got a reason for what they do, even if it's a reason that they're not proud of.

The character and the actor in a long-running series slowly become one. I think there must be funny stories about actors who, in the pilot for a TV series, did some weird thing with their eyes, or some speech impediment or something, and the next thing you know, it's eight years later, and they're still doing that freaking gag.

Brian is an archetypal character, a bit like Don Juan, which is how I play him. He's a blast to play. He believes unapologetically in his freedom. He holds nothing back. Something I'm learning is, you can't hate the character you play. If I think my character is an asshole, that's all that will come across. He is drawn in an extreme way, but that doesn't mean he's not a person.

I'm not that complicated as an actor. I have a formula in which I work, yeah. But not like Sean Penn does. Sean is one of the few actors I know who can work like that, actually becoming the character he is playing, and get consistent results. I don't believe you can ever be someone else. You manifest different levels of your own personality to come up with a character.

I always try doing a different character for every film so it's not just changing one.

It's our job as actors to make it look like it's not manufactured. If you have two actors who understand their characters - and therefore what they are trying to portray - then all they need to do is be the characters and there's a chemistry there.

I had the prosthetics on, and I went to my trailer, I looked in the mirror, and I smiled. And I was, like, "This is the character - everything she does is with a smile and a bit of glee and joy." And that's how I created Darla [from Buffy The Vampire Slayer]. Prior to that, I was, like, "I have no idea how to play this 400-year-old vampire from hell!".

You don't have to kill somebody to play a murderer. You have to read the script and interpret the character.

I did a film that was similar to that world, which was Brotherly Love, and the audience fell in love with [my character] June. So to be honest, I remembered what I did in that movie and studied that film and my mannerisms while shooting in Philly.

I have played several characters that are crabby and cranky. I don't know if I'm just not a very well-developed human being or if I don't know myself very well, but I tend to find I can take on elements of the characters that I'm playing. When I was playing a character like Becky Freeley in Miss Guided found that I was insanely positive and happy all the time.

I never like to go out of character when filming starts. I fear that if I do, I might not be able to pick it up again.

It's just like they approach things on every movie I've worked on, very much as if it was a live-action movie. The character you're playing, even though he's a rooster and is really stupid, you approach it in the same way you would approach Hamlet, which is exactly how I approached it. But they give you the circumstances. "You're on the boat. You didn't expect to be here. You just climbed in a boat to maybe sleep. You don't even know why you climbed in the boat. You're really that dumb.