Kiefer Sutherland Quotes

I think if you play characters, it's very important not to ever tag them with any sort of disorder, or diagnose them, or whatever. You have to normalize the behavior to get inside the character.

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

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.

Working on camera is a different ballgame in the sense that it's far more intimate work, but the basics and the foundations of being able to create something that isn't necessarily your own instincts - is a character that you have inside your head - whether you're talking about television or film or theater, that still has to be the grounding work.

Transformational acting was the reason why I became an actor in the first place. Your hair and make-up and the costume are the tools that you have, and it makes you feel like that person. When you look in the mirror, you don't feel like yourself, and it changes the way you move. I love that stuff.

For me, personality acting is not that interesting. I don't want to just be myself.

Some actors can distance themselves from the parts they play, but I fall into the category who use bits of themselves.

The way I approach acting when there's a real life character, it's sort of like a Venn diagram. What I come up with is some amalgam of the two of us.

You can say to actors that you've got to be the character and really get into it, but you have to make it realistic by bringing an element of yourself into it.

At drama school I learned the Stanislavski technique, which uses sentimental memories and bits of your past to put real emotion into the scene.

If you're playing someone who's impeded by fear, or shyness, or has whatever dysfunction your character might have, you have to achieve the dysfunction first, imaginatively, in order to play someone who is trying to negotiate their way out of it.

I was someone who was out of control and not to be worked with. It was partly because method acting was a new thing in Hollywood then and Marlon Brando had gotten through and Montgomery Clift had gotten through and James Dean but beyond that there wasn't really anybody.

Actors are always looking for ways to build a character.

If I was playing Carrie, I might have done differently but I felt like as my character. I mean, I'm definitely bringing myself to the role but I wanted to pay homage. I hope I did. We'll see.

I don't tend to spend the whole day in the personality of the person I'm playing.

Part of being an actor is almost self-hypnosis during those brief moments when the cameras are rolling. You want to actually believe you're Chris Gardner or Muhammad Ali.

You don't really have to do the things that your character is doing. But us actors, we use something called sense memory. I've certainly been drunk before, and part of my job is to recall that without getting drunk.

I'll never approach a part in the same way again. Piaf taught me so much. In terms of my work, I think I'll enjoy it even more than before, because now I know that characters truly exist in their own right. I'll have a way to bring them even more intensely to life.

I think a lot of that is what helped me develop my character. I wouldn't say it was Method, but it was definitely a little more in depth than I've done before in terms of acting. With the other kids, we all were such good friends by the time we started shooting. Because of that, it allowed us to trust each other more to push the dynamics of the relationship to places which you might not be able to had you not trusted that person.

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.

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.

It's like they talk about how American actors have the method and English actors just kind of switch views faster. And John [Hurt] is telling me the story as he's sitting in that witness chair, and they're putting the final touches of makeup on. And he goes, "Hold on a second," to stop his story so he can do the take. And he does this incredible take. They go, "Cut." And then immediately John goes, "Anyways, so Alec, he's playing the chess." And I'm just going, "Holy crap." You get whiplash from those kinds of quick turns!

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.

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.

The point of acting is to hide yourself and get lost in character. To play the same character in eighteen movies would be defeating the purpose I believe so I try to keep a little bit of diversity.