Shenaz Treasury Quotes

I do whatever I need to do to get into character. Sometimes it's being incredibly quiet, and sometimes it's being loose and goofy.

One of the reasons why good actors are good is that they have poor impulse control. If you put them in front of a camera, they respond as if it was actually happening, in real time, rather than doing it after several takes.

It was very difficult acting. I feel it is a very tough job to portray someone else's character and to behave like that on screen.

My favorite kind of acting scenes, or at least where I think people shine the brightest, are odes to Meisner technique scenes where people are face-to-face, and it's almost like a repetition exercise.

You can't have the real thing on camera - that's the nature of cinema. When you see people like Daniel Day-Lewis and Ralph Fiennes screaming and hyperventilating, you're seeing the phoniest kind of bad acting. You may as well have a 'men at work' sign. It's not acting if you can see it.

I was trained by Method acting teachers and we were taught that aside from whatever gift you may or may not have or the level of that gift, that you were obliged to know how to build a table. It's a craft. It's like being a ballerina or a violinist.

As a filmmaker I find it much more rewarding to work with actors who are classically trained. It's about the work and only the work.

Some actors get by with behaving, not acting. You've got to sell the effect. I act more in the 'Nightmare' movies because it's not like me. I'm acting, not reacting.

I like working one-on-one with someone, and I think that to go to a school of acting isn't really my thing.

In acting class, teachers talk about how the 'givens' of a situation help define a character.

I do not use any set methods, not even The Method. The character after all is in the lines.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

I am not a method actor, though I studied for a year with Lee Strasburg.

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 actually think acting is a form of self-hypnosis. You have to be hyper, hyper aware of what's going on around you. You have to know where the lens is, what the shot is, and where you're moving. And then you have to trick yourself into an emotional state where you believe this stuff is actually happening.

You know, I've never been much of a method actor. I feel like, with every project I go in extremely prepared and I like to have a good time.

I'm not a method actor; I hope you know that!

I had three influential teachers. The first was Uta Hagen. The second two, Bobby Lewis and my late husband, Charles Kakatsakis, were both from the Actors Studio.

I studied technique for ten years, from age 7 to 17. I guess you could say I went more on the Stanislavski side than the Meisner side - there's always that wide divide among actors when it comes to technique.

I started to see acting as a real science. That really helped me grow as an actor.

I don't really prepare for each role the same way.

It's what I learn from the great actors that I work with. Stillness. That's all and that's the hardest thing.

For me, acting is a series of impressions rather than trying to find one line through to the end, which risks becoming more of a presentation.

Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind of impossible.

On the whole, actors shout when they don't know what they're doing, trying to make an impact.