Ang Lee Quotes

I think acting can be very frustrating, and there's no experience that doesn't make you a better actor.

Working with Adrien Brody was like going to Julliard, but instead of four years, I went for four weeks. He was like the Albert Einstein of professors, it was just the best experience of my life. Adrien was the most influential mentor in my acting career thus far, and even after the movie he continues to mentor me.

There's a fine line between the Method actor and the schizophrenic.

I don't have any theories about acting, and I don't think about how to do it, except that an actor shouldn't take himself too seriously, and shouldn't try to make acting something it isn't.

I'd love to be one of those guys who could be like, 'Yeah, it's really exhausting,' but the truth is I'm not method. I don't take roles home.

Coming from documentaries, my biggest challenge was to understand actors' psychologies. American actors take it all very seriously; British actors don't enter into all this methody way of doing things.

Film acting is one of the only industries where you're criticized for working hard. In any other industry, it's considered a quality and something to behold.

I don't sit around with other actors and talk about the pain and the magic of acting.

I don't think it's necessary to be an actor to get great performances out of an actor. But I do think it helps me as a director because I know what I like as an actor, and I try to get that to the actors who I'm working with.

I'm always interested with other actors in what their process is, and are they still interested in acting, as opposed to being a star.

This acting's serious! And I really respect those actors. It's a tough business to be able to be something you're not and be natural and convince people on camera.

The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.

We ask actors to come to work ready to open a vein, to be emotionally thin-skinned. If someone screams, 'What about my coffee?' it's not about the coffee; it's because they're working in an emotional state. It ain't easy being an actor.

To be with Derek Jacobi and Stellan Skarsgard, it's a master class in acting every day.

I think there's a lot of mythos about what's required in acting. The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful - my personal life suffers.

Coming from theater, and having been to acting school, and done little, small Australian independent movies, a lot of the time, it's always about character.

Like any other actor, I draw on life experience.

You can't generalise, of course, but there is a school of American acting where there is a kind of pride in the number of takes you can do.

That is one of the reasons one enjoys acting. Now and again, you get scenes where you work with somebody really good and you have a good time trying to make it really work and really work well.

A lot of male actors are method actors and they become the characters which they both were.

Arnaud Desplechin invented me as an actor. I never imagined I'd be acting in movies.

No, I'm not a very methodologically pure actor.

I never thought of acting as a creative process. Christ, I used to go to the movies and see Brando talking like he was trying to sell shoes, and he was great. I thought anybody could do it. Then I tried it, and I got so uptight, I'm limited as to what I can do on film.

As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.