acting methods Quotes

There's so much to learn about acting and performance in general... I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.

For better or worse, I don't necessarily categorize myself as a method actor; I'm not going to make claims that I stayed in character 24/7.

I think in the past, around the time that method acting became so prevalent, it used to be that American actors were thought to be the kind that would work more from the inside out, and that the English actors worked more from the outside in.

Doing something like 'Damages,' I played a character with post-traumatic stress. I was playing with sleep deprivation. I was not sleeping; I stayed up for three days at a time, drinking Red Bull. I would get shaky and tired and hyper.

Everyone seems to think they know what acting techniques are. Techniques just help you get to a certain place, but if the thing is happening just by itself, you don't need those techniques.

Well you know, Woody doesn't rehearse, as opposed to my own method of directing where I really work with actors around a round table for weeks, examining the values of the material, so his technique is very different.

The foundation for film acting is stage acting.

There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there.

It is the same actor in theatre and cinema, just the technique of acting changes.

I trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute at Tisch, which is a huge foundation for young actors. They teach you their methods and give you the sense that acting is much more tangible than most people think. I think there's a mysticism of what acting is, in the fact that it's this ungraspable, spur-of-the-moment thing that nobody can understand.

I found out was, by the rhythm of my chewing, how I chewed fast, slow or what have you, I could tell the audience what my character was thinking and feeling.

I still go to acting class. I love the craft. It's just so much fun for me, and I'm always a student.

I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.

I've never like had a system or a program, I always think that I don't know how to act. I'll adapt to any director because I don't really have a set way that I do things. If a director hires me and says, "I want you to get started right now and do this research, this research, this research and I want you to have every line memorized before you ever show up for the first day," then that's what I'll do.

For me, I've never drawn a distinction between live-action acting and performance-capture acting. It is purely a technology.

A lot of male actors are method actors and they become the characters which they both were.

Every actor has a different temperament. Part of my job is to know what those boundaries are. The actor has to know you'll be there at the other end, that you're trying to represent them in the best light, who they are as they're harnessing these roles. The methods vary from actor to actor.

The difference - the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.

I don't know why all these actors think going to a gym or riding horses or learning how to fight are the steps to becoming an actor.

There's a whole language to movement and how you embody someone, and how you can use different techniques for different characters. I guess just posture, and the way you walk, and the way you physically are. All of that says a lot about who someone is.

From film to film, I realize my strengths and my weakness, and I realize how much better I get. I learn the lingo, I ask questions and I'm on set trying to figure out which shots they're going to use. For me, it's exploring the art. It's not just making a movie.

You have to teach yourself to act but Michael Chekhov will give you the necessary tools - and for me, Psychological Gesture and Centers are extremely valuable They work like a charm. I've used them all along and still do.

Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor.

I think that various styles and methods and approaches are an invention of people who don't understand the process of acting and who try very hard to label things.

There's no such thing as The Method. The term 'method-acting' is so much nonsense. There are many methods, many techniques.