Unknown Quotes

Trust the acting.

It's a challenge, writing about actors, especially a good actor, because you can't always tell when they're being honest and when they're pretending - that is, when they're acting. The really good ones don't always seem to know themselves.

The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.

The most significant piece of advice my father gave me early on about acting was, don't get caught acting. Really believe in what you're doing and then commit to it. Even if it feels uncomfortable, even if you feel that you're gonna look like an ass. It's all acting, but find the truth in a moment as opposed to just pretending you have and rather than trying to act your way out of it.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

I was a terrific liar as a child, and I believe my lies. So it's a natural step into acting.

An actress must be a woman whose emotional perceptions are true, and to make them so, she must have a fine contempt for any art or thought that betrays them for something false.

Well, you know what they say in Hollywood - the most important thing is being sincere, even if you have to fake it.

The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

That's the thing about acting - you can't fake it.

Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.

You can't make people believe in you if you play a horror part with your tongue in your cheek.

People assume actors are born liars, but I'd argue the actor's job is to tell the truth. And I've realised I'm not a good liar.

Even great actors who transform who they are still go to a really honest place; I think that's sort of that special skill that actors have.

With acting, a lot of it has to come from that real, honest place.

Emotional sounds don't lie.

Al Pacino, De Niro, Daniel Day Lewis - they're the best out there because everything they do comes from a very honest place.

We wanted to make something that sounded perfect because of the quality of the emotion...the honesty.

Actors always want you to believe something else even though that's the truth and to do that well it's almost a dying art.

Acting is the absence of acting. It's believing in the truth of the moment you are creating.

Acting is about being real, being honest.

The thing about any character is that you want to be sincere.

In interviews, on the set, talking to people, I'll just start talking about my parents' divorce, and go on and on. My mom's always like, 'You don't have to be that honest. You have to be more fake.' You see some of these actors, they have a permanent smile on their face. How can they do that? It really fascinates me.

At the end of the day, my sole goal, when I go into any scene, is to try to be as honest as I possibly can, and then everything else is second. The most important thing for me is to just be as honest as I possibly can.

Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.