Sam Taylor-Johnson Quotes

As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.

Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you.

And at NYU, I went to the Atlantic Theater Company, and they have two main points. One of them is to always be active in something instead of just feeling it. And the other is figuring out your character.

In film, you're always using your tools, your body, your voice, your emotions, but onstage, you use them in a different way.

Writing and directing might be a red herring, and really I'm just re-examining what it is to act, to do it well and do it properly.

Actors are observers of human life, of human behavior.

The whole business of being an actor is to explore, from research to shooting to why you do it. You're trying to see why people do what they do and how it feels to do what they do.

People think acting is just memorizing lines and doing facial expressions. No it's about traveling along a path of discovery, intention and connection.

As a filmmaker I find it much more rewarding to work with actors who are classically trained. It's about the work and only the work.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

Acting is what happens on the way.

Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.

As an actor, you are in a unique position because you're not only memorizing dialogue but really embodying it. You naturally feel the rhythm of good writing.

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.

What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing.

I think sometimes soap acting gets an unfair label for being bad and over the top. The lessons I learned there were so valuable. Seeing yourself every day on television, you learned what worked and didn't work, what was bad acting and what wasn't. Memorizing scripts became second nature.

I think acting really helps as a director. It's just no question, because you totally understand the acting process.

On the whole, actors shout when they don't know what they're doing, trying to make an impact.

I truly love the rehearsal process, those eight hours a day! I really love actors.

I love acting. It's an interesting challenge to make something that doesn't exist appear like it's happening, and to do it in a real way.

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

I try to create as many circumstances outside of set that help me fall into character when I get onto set.

The actor should not play a part. Like the Aeolian harps that used to be hung in the trees to be played only by the breeze, the actor should be an instrument played upon by the character he depicts.

Acting is somewhat mysteriously taught. There are so many different methods and systems and processes for teaching acting because it will always be an elusive art-form.

Honestly, I'm a shallow performer. I just go with the text and feel my way around it. There's not a whole lot of shaping.