Yash Chopra Quotes

Tennessee Williams is an incredible writer for women because, in many ways, his women characters are him. He writes so passionately.

Most women's pictures are as boring and as formulaic as men's pictures. In place of a car chase or a battle scene, what you get is an extreme closeup of a woman breaking down.

Sirk was every woman's dream of a director.

I became interested in educating people in the variety of ways in which women can express their emotion. Which is much easier to do in a large role than in a supporting role to a male protagonist. In general, the women in a supporting role to a male protagonist - cry a lot.

Southern women sometimes get dumbed down when they're turned into characters. I don't like that.

Take a look at Mila Kunis. When you see her performance in 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall,' you see a beauty there, and also a sadness.

I think the love scenes are very powerful and they're not trying to simply show the bodies of the actors but trying to reflect the inner feelings of the character so it's easier in that way.

It's always an interesting challenge to see if you can create a character that's got emotion.

I don't feel the pressure to deliver an unrealistically great man to the screen; I just want to be honest to who my character is on the page. If I can reflect that and put some heart into him and make him real, then I think I've done my job, and I think that people will like who he is.

I feel like it's too easy to just say, "We'll just change the name of this male character to a female, but have her do all the same things that a male does." I don't believe in that. I think there's something else. I think there's more to women than that.

Elijah can register such subtle emotion on his face that I loved doing close-ups on him. He really brings a superb emotional level to Frodo's scenes and although he is a very instinctive actor, we discussed the character thoroughly.

It's easier to write about heartbreak after you've had your heart broken. You have more material to draw from, you can extrapolate from your own experiences and make reasonable assumptions about how your characters would feel and act.

When you play a character that is so emotionally closed there are times when you ask yourself if you are doing enough and if it's reading. That is where you have a director, who is the barometer of what you are doing.

I don't see any difference in the craft of acting, in film or television. It's absolutely the same. It's different storytelling, playing a character over multiple hours, as opposed to two.

Never say never - and I certainly don't judge anyone who does it. But most of the characters I play are going through some kind of emotional turmoil, so my job requires me to have expression. If my face was froze, what right do I have to play that part? All the women who haven't done anything to their faces are still able to play great roles. And some of the ones who have done something have messed it up - they look freakish. Anyway, for me it's about playing women with rich lives - and the longer the life, the deeper the wrinkles.

What I love in working on film is just working with actors. It's one thing to write scenes alone over a keyboard and to imagine the actions and reactions in your head, but it's a completely other thing to hear actors speaking your words, to see their bodies bringing the fullness of emotion, need, desire and pain to life right in front of you. It's amazing.

I don't think male characters are as one-dimensional as female characters.

I've never played a character that is just beautiful, but sometimes you can read scripts that sound so shallow, like women are objects. I've never done something like that, though.

The actor has to have some degree of craft, along with the talent. No one tries to laugh except bad actors. No one tries to cry except bad actors. How a character hides his feelings tells us who he is. Most people don't know that, and most actors don't do that. Therefore, there are a lot of actors who put me to sleep, that are considered good actors, but they're predictable and boring. I know how the scene is going to end before it ends.

I really feel our job as actors is to find a human experience in the character. So, for me, genre comes second; it's about script and the emotional journey of that character. Genre definitely has an impact, but it has more of an impact on the way the character is expressed. We all have the same core emotions of love, jealousy, rage - it's just how they're expressed.

It's always interesting to play characters who are vulnerable and how you display that vulnerability and what it's going to mean to people who watch it.

It depends on the story and the filmmaker. And it depends on the character, and the heart and soul of the person that I see on the page, and if it resonates with something that I think I can summon in myself.

It's harder to play a quiet character because everything happens in their stream of consciousness. They're thinking and feeling the world, but they're saying very little, so then you have to communicate it through your behavior.

I really am a character actor, in my heart of hearts, because I really do like developing characters and painting a past for them.

As an actor playing a character, you look for all of those avenues to see if there's any sense of vulnerability or love that you can bring to a character, and decide how that's portrayed and how that's going to be a struggle with the other characters. It's your job to take that on and challenge yourself, and meet that head on and see what happens with it.