Robert Carlyle Quotes

For me really good acting is about subtext.

I'm an instinctive actor. I just see the part and play it. I'm more interested in what isn't said - the silences.

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

So much of writing is about what characters don't say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.

Your internal dialogue has got to be different from what you say. And, you know, in film, hopefully that registers and speaks volumes. It's always the unspoken word and what's happening behind someone's eyes that makes it so rich.

Movie characters rarely get to think out loud or talk very much about their emotions. Instead they have to, very briefly, show their feelings through their action or through dialog.

I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

Sometimes, what's not said is just as important to the writing as what is said. As a writer, we have our voices heard. I think that, at oftentimes, the ability to allow the dialogue to recede properly into the world of the film is also a really valid sort of way to be a writer, I think.

There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about - the thing about screen acting is that you can read people's thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that.

I don't need dialogue to convey emotion or thoughts to my audience.

The actor always must be in the scene, not above the scene. To communicate any larger ideas is my problem; it's how the narrative is constructed and directed that hopefully does it.

I watched season four of 'The Wire.' They have subtle performances that they do through their eyes. You could watch season four with the audio off and still understand what's happening through their eyes.

Breathing is always key in any character. When you have a character with no voice, that makes it even more important.

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.

As much as movies are about the words that you're saying, they're also about what's not said, the silent moments.

In a Western, you talk more with your eyes and your actions than you do with big speeches. I love that.

For me, that is the craft of acting: literally creating something from nothing.

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

Peter Morgan's writing is so much about what you don't say: you're saying one thing but there's 10 other things going on, and those are the best writers like Chekhov... they're masters at a sort of naturalism, and yet there is all the subtext.

Emotional power is maybe the most valuable thing that an actor can have.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

I'm very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.