Hiroyuki Sanada Quotes

I know just enough Japanese to get by if I get lost and greet an audience properly, just from having a lot of Japanese friends and being there over the years.

I speak a little Portuguese, but my daughter speaks it better than me. I always feel that Italy is my home, but it is important for my husband that we also live in France. Sometimes we live as a family all together, but as we are two working actors, sometimes we have to be apart. Sometimes I'm shooting a movie; sometimes he is.

I use Mandarin, Korean and English on a daily basis and usually only use Cantonese when I'm speaking with my relatives. I don't think it's very difficult for me to switch between each language because I've been doing it for so long.

When I did my first film, I did not understand or speak Telugu.

I'm always very keen to learn a skill or a language for my films.

I tried to learn the languages - Italian, Spanish, and German - not to successfully. Working on a European set isn't a hell of a lot different from working on an American set.

That's why it's important to be multilingual, because it teaches you so much about your own language.

We do not for example say that the person has a perfect knowledge of some language L similar to English but still different from it. What we say is that the child or foreigner has a 'partial knowledge of English' or is 'on his or her way' towards acquiring knowledge of English, and if they reach this goal, they will then know English.

My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.

I was always looking for a career that could combine my creative interests with my technical side, and it ends up directing films is the perfect combination.

One cannot overstate the potential for hysteria on a movie set. Everyone always acts as if making the movie is as important as eradicating malaria.

Movies are movies. Some bend light through a lens. Some create moving images virtually. At the end of the day, movies are movies.

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

How fast you are moving is more important than where you are.

It is an absolute privilege to be able to speak another language and have it be something you grew up with. I think it's a very important thing and I think that everywhere else in the world people speak more than one language.

I loved being asked 2,000 questions a day, storyboarding every move, knowing as though by instinct exactly where the camera had to be, because it was my story.

I studied French forever, and when do I ever speak French? I clearly should have studied Spanish. I wish I had stuck with music, because that would still be great. I really wish I had learned to surf earlier in my life.

So learning to play a new instrument, learning a new language - those sorts of things will pay dividends for years or decades to come.

I am collecting the lessons each faction has to teach me, and storing them in my mind like a guidebook for moving through the world. There is always somthing to learn, always somthing that is important to understand

If we were multilingual, imagine how much you would learn about your own culture, about the sensibilities of what's important in your own culture.

The next movie will be in Mandarin. I enjoyed shooting all the Japanese stuff in Kill Bill so much that this whole film will be entirely in Mandarin.

Kissing scenes are never romantic or sexy, they're actually super technical, like, "Move your head, you're blocking her light," or, "Stop looking like an idiot when you kiss her." You do it again and again because of the camera angles and takes and whatnot. So by the end of it, it's not even kissing. All the anything is totally drained out of it.

L.A. is this huge epicenter of the most popular person. Can you imagine, every single high school in the world where someone says, "You're so beautiful, you could be a movie star," all of those one people move to this town called L.A.

I love REAL set construction and think that sets are very important part of the storytelling and scope of a film.

I had a checklist in my mind of the things that make a biography practical. Is the source material centralized? Is it easy to find? Are there new primary sources that no one has ever had access to? Are all the sources in English? If they're not, are they in a language that you speak? And I realized that not only is Armstrong the most important figure of Jazz in the 20th Century, but he's a perfect subject for a biography for all of these reasons. I had always loved his music and I had been fascinated in him as a personality. And that's really the key to writing a biography.