Stanley Kubrick Quotes

I think anything emotional adds to your acting and singing, no matter what it is that you go through. It will always add to it, never take away.

The director's job is to know what emotional statement he wants a character to convey in his scene or his line, and to exercise taste and judgment in helping the actor give his best possible performance.

I think you can really tell a good actor if you can put a camera on them and they can just talk and emote and react and you don't have to keep cutting away from them, because they are the language and the behavior. It's all a tour-de-force performance.

I try to get the best performance an actor can give.

I believe that the performance of my actors is of utmost importance to make a good film.

I've seen what a difference a good director can make to an actor's performance.

You look at somebody's work as an actor and you can see their emotional life being fed into it and you can kind of feel them through it.

What actors need to do is to find a way to show people their despair, their joy, their pain, their exhilaration. All of these deep, deep emotional things - good and bad - so that if you're able to do that, then there's a kind of resonance that happens.

I think the book is less emotional than the film. With the film, the emotions are much more raw and in front. In the book, they are kind of ironized and seen through comedy.

Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

That's where you can find things and modulate your performance and give the other actors something fresh to respond to. We've probably all worked with actors who when it's suddenly your close up, they get sleepy. I don't like that. It's selfish acting, and I won't tolerate it.

I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing . . . the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood.

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

As an actor, I feel like I'm somebody who, when somebody gives me a mark, I don't want to hit it. I don't like that. But then, without even knowing it, I just hit it.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete.

Acting is bad acting if the actor himself gets emotional in the act of making the audience cry. The object is to make the audience cry, but not cry yourself. The emotion has to be inside the actor, not outside. If you stand there weeping and wailing, all your emotions will go down your shirt and nothing will go out to your audience. Audience control is really about the actor

You have to find actors who have the ability to display a wide range of emotion effectively. That's so much harder than it seems.

The youngsters coming up now just go through the motions necessary to make the play. They should bounce around a little, show some life and zip. It adds a little action and gives the fans something to look at rather than the monotonous routine, no matter how perfectly the play is made.

I love acting with very little dialogue. As long as it's supported. I mean, in terms of cinema, you can have a great monologue, but if you're not supported by the images ... You can be feeling things and then you see it back, and you're like, "None of that came across." Or the angle of my face gives it a completely different interpretation than what I was trying to communicate.

Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words

When entertainment works the best, you're creating an apparatus to convey emotions.

I knew it was going to be important that if I had an audience understand who she was, then all those things had to come from a place that was grounded, as opposed to being tics and manners and twitches. I didn't think it was going to be as rich, perhaps, as if I was going to make it more emotional.

Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.

I think that both musicals and opera have a capacity to get to an inner emotional landscape.