Emmanuelle Riva Quotes

I sort of thought acting was just about arranging your face into emotions. I didn't realise it was about actually allowing yourself to feel the feelings, then letting your face follow. That was a big learning curve.

Like any other actor, I draw on life experience.

Sometimes fake laughing is hard once you've done a scene 18 times. I don't want to brag, but I have a reputation for being very, very good at that. It's funny finding what's challenging about acting as you go.

There are elements of myself in every character I do, just because you take from your real life experiences and sprinkle those into your character.

As an actor, you go in your own personal life and pull from your personal life, so that's what I do.

The worst acting is about imitation.

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

I'm an emotional actor. When I'm doing a scene, I really believe it. I live the part as long as I'm in the scene.

The interesting thing about acting is using all your own stuff and having some kind of personal catharsis while you're working.

I trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute at Tisch, which is a huge foundation for young actors. They teach you their methods and give you the sense that acting is much more tangible than most people think. I think there's a mysticism of what acting is, in the fact that it's this ungraspable, spur-of-the-moment thing that nobody can understand.

Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality, and discovering the character you're playing through your own experience - so we're all different.

Acting is not just impersonating your character.

That's one of the things that's great about acting. You can play all the different aspects of a human being.

The actor's job is to put themselves in the shoes of the character they are trying to portray as truthfully as possible.

I studied method acting for four years and I'm a big believer in the idea that it's not about the actual experience itself. You don't have to go through exactly what this character has gone through.

For actors, you've gotta sometimes fill in your backstory.

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

As an actor, you always want to find a piece of who you are in every role you take on.

Actors walk around wearing these little tool-belts of acting skills. And I just don't find that interesting to watch. I never want to see someone who clearly can cry at the drop of a hat. That's so uninteresting.

That's what acting is. You're pretending to be someone else.

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

Acting is actually private.

In acting process, it's very difficult to explain. It's something very intimate, very private.

With 'Taxi Driver,' I had this eureka moment. I realized that acting could be much more than what I had been doing. I had to build a character that wasn't me.