Max Minghella Quotes

Sometimes the character will go into a completely different direction than I expected once the cameras start rolling. That's what I love about what I do.

When you're an actor you don't really know what you have to do until you see what you look like.

With theatre, you have to be ready for anything.

That's the thing about film acting and television acting. You just release yourself and do what is true for the moment, and ignore everybody and everything and all the technical razzmatazz that goes on.

Acting to me is always reacting.

The reason the contracts are so long is because actors are very spontaneous; we may want to do Shakespeare one day and be Porky Pig the next!

Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.

The hardest job an actor can do is all this pretend, all this screaming and being scared for your life.

Acting is great. You spend your whole life trying to get it right.

You can't really plan with acting!

I am a natural actor. I try to keep it spontaneous as far as possible. That is my mantra.

With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you're gonna get out of it. It's like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you're acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit strategy, and have the cameras rolling.

When they came to you for your line, you had to be ready and you had to get it in one.

For the actors, the talent is to serve the demands that I ask of them, to do it with naturality and truth, and to be honest when we were terrified.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

I'm not a Method actor. I don't believe acting should be psychodrama. I look within myself and see what I can find to play the role with. If I'm playing a blind man, I don't go around blindfolded for days. A lot of good actors would, but I don't go in for that very much. I like to just make it up as I go along.

With a play, for me, there's no time to sit back on it. You're living on your instincts. And every night there are subtle changes and adjustments, because what's in front of you is a living, breathing audience.

Spontaneity is such an entertaining facet of show business.

I love doing emotional scenes. As I've had a perfect life, I don't really have much to pull from. But it's really fun and not that challenging. It's almost pretty easy. The hardest thing is to try and make people laugh. That's a really hard thing.

When on the set of a film, you have to play natural for entire scenes in a very unnatural environment. You have to express emotions and interact with other actors and also use your voice.

The art of acting is to pitch good. You do the pitching and hope that the other person catches the ball and does some good pitching back to you.

You can't plan everything - if I did a performance exactly how I rehearsed it, it would be so boring.

To have an opportunity to get in front of a camera every single day is just priceless because it gets you closer and closer to being less self-consciousness in front of it and really being human and really making choices and standing by them.

Sometimes I know a joke I'm going to yell out ahead of time, but most of the time it's stream of conscious. You never really know it until you've got everyone dressed up, the set is built, all the extras are here.

As actors, we're always asked to portray and react to these extreme circumstances, otherwise it's not interesting. They are agonizing things to think about.