Acting for the Camera Quotes

I started going to acting school in my senior year in high school, and I remained in acting school through four years of college.

That was the beginning of modern acting for me. You don't have to tell a camera everything. It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.

Why do you act? You act for an audience. In the theatre, you're in their presence. Film stars don't know what it is to have an audience.

I went to acting school in New York City for two years. I studied with Stella Adler.

I love film, but it's funny going to drama school for three years, where you spend most of your time training for theatre, then coming out and just doing films.

Film has always been hard for me, I'm basically a stage actress. I never felt comfortable in front of the camera.

I have a coach, but I'm not theater-trained or a technical actor.

Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.

I was trained by Method acting teachers and we were taught that aside from whatever gift you may or may not have or the level of that gift, that you were obliged to know how to build a table. It's a craft. It's like being a ballerina or a violinist.

Naseer Sir taught me while I was a student at the Film and Television Institute of India. Anything I know about acting is thanks to him.

I want to do more movies. I feel like it's a totally different skill set than there is to theater. It's much more internal.

I think the education I've had as an actor I would never have had at university.

Doing a piece on film is completely different from doing it onstage.

I trained in Toronto with a private acting teacher, who was wonderful, for years growing up.

I feel that doing theater does give you a good grounding to work on camera. The audience is the lens.

As an actor, the first thing you're taught is, 'Don't look into the camera; ignore it.'

You can see some very great theatre actors who don't work at all well on screen. They're trying too hard at it.

On television, you have an intimate moment with the camera. In theater, you are making something live with people there. My brain doesn't understand that you don't get another take ever. I'm finally learning on TV that you can do something over if you make a mistake.

As an actor, I had noticed very vividly that very few directors know how to direct actors because they haven't done it.

Most theater methodology is predicated on the idea of repeated actions. That's what you work toward. Having the actor repeat the same moment eight times a week. In a film, it's getting that one moment right.