Max von Sydow Quotes

What 'Floating Worlds' does draw on is Holland's artistry in bringing the past to life in her historical fiction and depicting the people who inhabited that past.

It's important that period films aren't seen as just a lovely visual exercise.

It's something I'd find rather distracting in a historical piece, looking at characters that have obviously just gotten off their Ab Blaster. You see a piece set in the 1300s or the 1800s, and you've got characters who have perfect abs and are incredibly well-groomed, not a hair out of place, and it just doesn't make sense.

I see it in a lot of period pieces where everybody is standing and talking, in a stilted, archaic way, instead of being loose in the world. So, I try to do a little bit of research, just so that I can feel like I'm grounded, but then I try to bring as much of my human understanding that I can, under the filter of it being 1865.

Sometimes when you're working on a period piece, there's this tendency to be nostalgic about the period and do everything superglamorous, which can end up looking cliche.

The girls in 'Downton Abbey' do what they do so well, which is make it so natural despite the fact that you're living within these constraints and taking so much from the research aspect of it.

You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.

I like the stories with the historical themes.

The BBC is very good at period drama - world-famous for getting the details right.

If there's anything about someone's life that's important enough to make a movie about it, I have to take responsibility to get all of it right. It's a huge responsibility.

I find that with period pieces, you're sort of able to really take advantage of what's around you because prop-wise, wardrobe-wise and location-wise, it's all so specific due to that time.

I wasn't setting out to write a documentary; if I had, I would have done it in a completely different way. I was asked to write a drama that would appeal to a big audience in America that had no knowledge or interest in The Tudors at all.

There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

Anyone who says a movie about history is a historical document is crazy.

With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.

That, for me, actually is the most important thing about doing a period film is trying to make these people as lovable as they are back then.

All the historical elements should feel organic to the story but not hammered down to serve a purpose.

It's always shocking when you see a modern woman in a period story line. It doesn't make sense.

Characters work really well when they're reflective of the times that they're operating in.

I'd always wanted to do costume drama, but period dramas often become very wooden. Just because they're born in the 1400s, all of a sudden people start losing their sense of humour or their personalities.

The closer you can get to your setting and to primary sources, the more authentic your history is going to be.

I wanted to do a period piece. I wanted to be on a show that people would actually watch, that was of quality.

It's hard to find actors that don't feel contemporary when you put them in a period piece.