Helen Mirren Quotes

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, 'One tear, right now,' that one tear would pop out.

Sometimes it was tough doing take after take upside down! I did a lot of that sort of thing.

I think the height of ridiculousness was when I was playing Elizabeth in 'The Golden Age' while preparing to start shooting 'I'm Not There.' I literally finished filming Elizabethan grandeur on Friday, flew to Montreal, and started being Bob Dylan on Monday.

I'm not one of those people who can cry on cue. If I have to cry in an audition, I'm like, 'Okay, let me see what I can do.'

Sometimes you will do a close-up for a scene in the morning where you are totally distraught, then shoot the rest of that scene seven hours later. How do you hang on to that feeling all day without burning up, without going so far that you have nothing left to give when the cameras roll again?

You have to find it in the moment, and that's one of the challenges of being an actor - especially a film actor - is that you have to maintain these heightened emotions for long periods of time. There's no trick to it. You just have to do.

In films, you work for three to six months, and you're out of the character. But for a daily soap, you don't have that luxury. So the character has to be convincing. Otherwise, your mind is not in it, and you're just working for money, which is a good amount in serials. But I want both: good acting and good money.

It isn't that easy to drop character, especially when you shoot for 12 to 16 hours a day for six months.

I've always liked horror films, but I have discovered that shooting for scenes in which you play a spirit is not easy.

Having been trained as a stage actor, and then you go out there and you're on 40,000 acres and you have a horse under you and you're shooting a real gun, you almost don't have to act. It's just really amazing.

It was good but it was just a tiny bit uncomfortable because it was a day of lying in the bushes and I think I got a major muscle thing going on there! But it was good. It was fun. That is one of the things you get to do in film that you don't do, or that I don't do, in real life. I can't speak for Dermot [Mulroney]! But it was fun.

I know I can never work in a comedy because I can't keep a goddamn straight face.

Making movies in France is different, but it's still acting, you know. You still have doubts and you're scared, always, but I really love doing films in America, because I love to speak English. But I think there's something very entertaining about American films. But I also like the intimacy of French films.

As an actor, often you're stuck with these scenes in which a great period of time is in between them - for example, if you do a biopic, it might be a year, it might be a decade, you never know.

In times of crisis, it is of the utmost importance that one does not lose her head. Marie Antoinette

I can keep my head together in a crisis.

I always hope for roles that have some depth and that I can get my teeth into and that will challenge me, in some way.

Getting into the character is difficult and letting go of your life and the things that kind of define you, whatever it is in life that's your daily routine because you sort of find yourself in this other life and that's difficult and the other end is difficult.

The danger of course is always is caricature. The biggest challenge was to sound like Nelson Mandela. Everything else is easy to do, walk like him. He has a few ticks and things I noticed that I picked up. I didn't have any agenda, as it were, in playing the role other than to bring it as close to reality as I possibly could.

When I get hired as an actor as opposed to a writer, one of things that's exciting for me is doing stuff I wouldn't normally do myself. So whether it's a kid's movie or a voice in animation or in this case - where I just get to be silly, it's a different kind of comedy for me. As a performer, it's a different pleasure than when you're writing or directing. As a performer, you're just in the hands of the director and you go with whatever they want to do.

I think I'd rather do [acting] in the real place. It requires different things, working with green screen, but its an imaginative exercise anyway, the whole business of acting, so it just gives you a bit more to feed the imagination. Unless it's really silly, just two of you stuck in a space with nothing but green screen that's got to be pretty difficult.

It's hard to play a continuing character like Loomis for nearly 11 years and simply wash your hands of him. It seems a pity.

Playing with guns you revert to a little boy sometimes. But they're not great things to play with, so it's just making them look real. When it comes to shooting guns or using any prop, you've got to make it look like you know what you're doing with them. It's called acting.

Playing Elizabeth Taylor was probably the hardest job I've ever done.

Well, I'm not at all like the tough, sexy femme fatale in Confidence but it's fun to play people who're really different from you, from different cultures and places. I suppose I'm a bit quieter than most of the people I play.