Marlon Brando Quotes

As an actor, you generally want to see the other actor's face.

The close-up says everything.

Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.

Eyes are the greatest tool in film. Mr. Capra taught me that. Sure it's nice to say very good dialogue, if you can get it. But great movie acting - watch the eyes!

The close-up, according to D.W. Griffith, allows subtle changes of facial expression-the raising of an eyebrow or the flicker of a smile-to become part of the action.

Indian actors know how to shout with the eyes.

It's in the eyes, mostly. Don't listen just to the other actor's lines. Look at - and listen to - their eyes. That's where the emotion comes through.

The terrain of the face is the most dynamic thing you can point the camera at, to me. I love production design and bells and whistles and all of that. I love a technograin as much as the next gal, but a great actor's face? What else should we be looking at?

I tried Botox one time and was permanently surprised for a couple of months. It was not a cute look for me. My feeling is, I have three children who should know what emotion I'm feeling at the exact moment I'm feeling it... that is critical.

You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.

I always kind of aim with the action stuff to make it feel like, as an audience member, you're experiencing what the people are experiencing. As soon as you go into slow-mo or repeated edits, shooting it like it's a stunt, it takes it out of that reality. The more real you make that stuff, the more tense it will be.

As an actor, you have many tools - your body, your voice, your emotions, mentally. In film, you have your eyes because they communicate your thought process. In fact, generally in film, what you don't say is more important than what you say. That's not so much the case for stage.

The greatest acting really is spoken without words, or at least I like to think that.

Theatre is more metaphorical where you have to be louder and larger than life, whereas film is more subtle and more real.

Actors are bloody marvelous at hiding.

My favorite films left the camera rest, and the actors and characters have a stage to act. Move the camera when it's motivating.

I think you can be much truer to real emotions and reality by creating something that on the surface seems artificial but, by then putting everything together in the end, is much more impactful than trying to use realism in every individual element of the film.

All my muscles are in my face. I have a very muscular face. I'm good with faces. I always have been.

I love being so tight on people in close-ups that the veins in their eyes look like the Mississippi River.

I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete.

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.

There are few faces that can afford to smile: a smile is sometimes bewitching, in general vapid, often a contortion.

Sometimes you can do certain things on stage, or even in a TV series, and people see the look on your face and they know what you mean, so you can get away with certain things. But if you can't create that look on an animated character, which is essentially a puppet, the line will hit the audience in a very bad way.

Work for the actor lies essentially in two areas: the ability to consistently create reality and the ability to express that reality.