Jeff Bridges Quotes

Once, Naseeruddin Shah told me that the wafer shop was the best acting school that I could have attended. And I completely agree. I observed every customer very minutely and picked up some quirk or the other. Later, I used those experiences while playing different characters.

I'm not a trained actor. I have neither read acting books nor gone to acting school. But I have certain fundamentals on how I approach a character; the basic skeleton of my preparation is based on observations from real life.

Our job as actors is to invent the things that bridge ourselves with the characters, so you have to build something if it's not there - you try and learn what makes people behave in a certain way.

I'm a technician. I don't go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.

I make a playlist for every character I portray. Music plays a huge part in helping me understand a character. Every time I get a new role, I will take a chunk of time to just sit and listen to a bunch of songs and select the ones that make sense in my mind for that character. I can't even explain how much it helps me.

I guess I'm probably a Method actor; I don't know... I just think of it as staying in the zone.

Part of an actor's job is to find correlations between your own life and the life of the person you are playing.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.

You jot down ideas, memories, whatever, concerning your real life that somehow parallels the character you're playing, and you incorporate that in your scene work.

The trick to acting is not to show off, it's to think the thoughts of the character.

People talk about method actors, meaning someone that's prepared very, very well, or whatever they mean when they talk about it. But the right method is whatever works for you. And what works for me on any given day is going to be different.

There were time when I was into method acting that I did have moments of residual character emotions, because the method bases your emotional responses as a character on emotional experiences from your real life.

In terms of jumping into a character's skin, I try to immerse myself in the role as much as possible to bring me closer to them. All I do is what's required to achieve what I want to achieve.

I like to rehearse. We did a lot of rehearsals for 'Moneyball,' but it is really individual to the actor. It's not like, 'Here is my process, everybody. Fit in.'

As an actor, I come to set, and I have already broken the character down by writing a poem about the character. I try to write in his voice, the way he would write it.

I don't watch anything of mine much. I haven't gone to drama school, or college, either. I just like to watch other actors in action. I learned so much from working with De Niro. I'd be in a scene with him where I was supposed to be acting, and I was just watching.

I find that I kind of have to sink into the character.

When I prepare for a role, I try to get inside the character's head and understand him.

There are so many ways to approach a character. You have to figure out the similarities between you and the character, build on them, and at the same time, blur the dissimilarities. Since you do it day in and day out, it becomes a process and a part of you.

As an actor, you create a character from your understanding of what you have heard and your observations. Eventually, every film is an extension of the images that I have seen or what I have heard or read somewhere.

I'm the sort of actor who likes to talk about what we're going to do.

I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because I'm recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because I'm concentrating on what the character is going through.

I'm not a Method actor. I don't believe acting should be psychodrama. I look within myself and see what I can find to play the role with. If I'm playing a blind man, I don't go around blindfolded for days. A lot of good actors would, but I don't go in for that very much. I like to just make it up as I go along.

As a filmmaker I find it much more rewarding to work with actors who are classically trained. It's about the work and only the work.