Kelli O'Hara Quotes

As an actor, you can do what you want with your role. That's why they hire you; to take the role and make it real.

I personally take cues directly from the script, then I like to surprise the other actors. But you must maintain control on a level and see how far you can go up, down or out emotionally. You have to balance the craft with spontaneity.

I don't pick my roles by genre; that's kind of silly.

In all the great periods of the drama perfect freedom of choice and subject, perfect freedom of individual treatment, and an audience eager to give itself to sympathetic listening, even if instruction be involved, have brought the great results.

Many times, when a director reads a script and wants somebody who says 'Far out', then they let me do what I want with it and that's usually more interesting for an actor.

There's a certain arrogance to an actor who will look at a script and feel like, because the words are simple, maybe they can paraphrase it and make it better.

Actors are such wonderful creatures and such wonderful instruments. It's always different on the page or in my head. I hear it differently. I see it differently. And then, you give it to an actor, and it comes alive in a way that you didn't expect.

My rule of thumb is to always do what's on the page first. Then you can talk to your director about playing with it. Improv frees me up in a character, but I would be mortified if the writers who agonized over their words assumed I thought my improv was more valuable.

When you make drama you are like Picasso. Drama is whatever you want it to be.

There's a rhythm to script [ in "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"], as well, especially the pacing of it. But there definitely were times when I would say something and [ Macon Blair] would say, "I didn't think to deliver it like that" or, "I didn't think it had that meaning." And he'd say, "I like it. I think it's good." So he's open. He's not battering it into you.

I never thought about whether film is inherently more sincere, because certainly I think if Guy Maddin had directed A Series Of Unfortunate Events, there probably could have been more of the stage-y irony that is in the books. But I was just interested to see what people would do with it, and worrying that Brad Silberling wouldn't do what I had in mind.

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

For right now, I'd like to tell stories that I want to tell. I haven't wanted to use someone else's material yet, but I would with the show. It's become an integral enough part of me now, that I could definitely tell a story in this.

This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.

It was a pleasure to have somebody else be the boss. It wouldn't have been nearly as much fun any other way. He's been around and made a lot of movies and he's a great straightforward person to work for. And it was a pleasure to see other people to pick up characters that you've sketched out loosely on paper and make them into something fascinating.

I think it's harder to make a classic now, not because of what people say, but because artists now are so concerned with what people say.

Black Poetry is not for Black People...it is for everybody

The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.

Those are the rules. To improvise in a movie with other people, when they're following a script, everybody has to know what's going on. I think a line or two we might change. Certainly, I do. But I wouldn't call it improvising. I'd call it fudging the lines.

The great use of copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning color; yet even coloring will never be perfectly attained by servilely copying the model before you.

Every film I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I'm working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.

When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn't acting. It's following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that. So the director's task is just that – to direct, to point the way. Then the actor takes over. And he must be allowed the space, the freedom to express himself in the role. Without that space, an actor is no more than an unthinking robot with a chest-full of push-buttons.

It was more freedom than I think most people get when they're starting out - or even when they're not starting out. He [John Cassavetes] did his thing and I did whatever I thought.

You should always have a product that has nothing to do with who you are or what people think about you... so that you never start thinking that your product is you, or your fame or your aura.

I never work from the script. I get the script more or less.