Walter Matthau Quotes

I did private study for about a month, five days a week, six hours a day. I came to understand the character in ways that I never would've previous to that. I was so innocent in respect to ways of creating characters.

Gestating characters feels something like the mental equivalent of gestating a baby. In both cases, to create them you lose yourself. Or at least you reshape yourself to encompass them.

Mike Leigh encourages you to choose a person that you know to base your character on. You write a whole list of people that you know and you go through that list in great depth with him. And then he chooses one of those people from your list.

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.

I don't believe that a writer does something wonderful spontaneously. I believe it's the result of years of living, of study, reading, his very personality and temperament. At one particular moment, all these come together and the artist 'expresses' himself.

I love to see how a character unfolds off the page in a project. I don't always know how the character is going to turn out, even with the script being there. It's not always clear where that character is going to take me. Or where I will take them.

I remember, working on 'Lost,' I learned very quickly the way that I had to approach the material or even ask the director questions. It was always prefaced with, 'Would it be wrong for me to assume?' Because I didn't know where my character on 'Lost' was going.

Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.

Well, I think it can be quite helpful to be working on a character who actually existed, historically. Of course, you might have material to study and help you create the character.

I'm one of those lazy actors; I like to take what the playwright wrote and work with that.

I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.

I like to be in a different place when I make a movie so that I can't really focus on anything else, and that is your world.

I don't think I'm an actor who takes their characters home with him. But I certainly do take the preparation home.

I don't worry too much about learning lines per se. The memorization is the easy part for me, usually. For me, it's more about working on the context, back story, intention, motivation, etc. Once that's in place, the lines come pretty naturally.

I think everything happens organically. You mine for clues. It's all immersive, and stuff you can use comes out of that immersion. I don't really like to wear wigs in movies because I like to look like the character all the time.

The stuff that I learned on 'Sons,' the education of how to tell stories, was part of that mythology. It's hard to look at it and go, 'Oh, if I knew this, I would have done it this way,' because the fact is I like to think that all that sort of unraveled as it was supposed to.

Sometimes, when you get into a record, it's like writing a book, and you get so far inside the story you can't tell anymore if it's gonna be good to an outside listener.

It's funny, because you want to make it different, but when I start building a character I do the same thing with each of them, which is start with a blank canvas. It's like painting a picture.

You can't just skim the surface of any role. You have to find the depths, because any other way would be dishonest.

It takes a while to establish a character. Richard Boone once told me he didn't really get the character in 'Have Gun - Will Travel' until the 16th show. You just plant a seed, water it, let the sun shine on it, and hope it blooms.

I guess, as a director, you sort of take the script, and you find ways to interpret it.

The way I work is I like to immerse myself in the world of the film and in the character's lives, and then from that, I get a lot of ideas of how the film could be made, how it could be told.

You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences. The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings. The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

A lot of actors choose parts by the scripts, but I don't trust reading the scripts that much. I try to get some friends together and read a script aloud. Sometimes I read scripts and record them and play them back to see if there's a movie. It's very evocative; it's like a first cut because you hear 'She walked to the door,' and you visualize all these things. 'She opens the door' . . . because you read the stage directions, too.

When I start a movie, I already feel like I'm in it. I'm not a jobbing actor anymore; most of the films I do, I'm involved with development. Some, I've taken from scratch, and worked so heavily on the script, I'm embodying a lot of the character by the time I even get close to filming, because I've asked so many of the questions that I do. There is nothing better than being able to ask all the questions, do all the work. It's when you let it go that you fly.