Acting is about being real, being honest.
There's a large chunk of me in all the parts. As an actor, I got involved largely because I want to let things out. The best acting is that that is most real and the only way to do that, is to genuinely feel it.
I'm looking for me to disappear, and the acting to disappear, and all you see is a real person.
I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.
The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics-he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word used for this unqualifying affection is 'cynicism'.
Acting is the absence of acting. It's believing in the truth of the moment you are creating.
In every spoof I make real love to the things I am spoofing.
"Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera."
What you hope, what you're trusting the filmmaker to do, is to capture the emotional truth of the situation.
You give, actually, what you have in your inner world through your emotion and feeling. That's what you can give; it's not so much about "acting" in a sense of playing something that's very different to you.
For the sadness in legitimate humour consists in the fact that honestly and without deceit it reflects in a purely human way upon what it is to be a child.
I think it's a big chance to take to make a movie that's about as something as pure and honest and something people can relate to everyday.
As an actor, that's the most important thing. You want to be able to let go and not hold onto anything, so that you can give an honest portrayal and performance.
It's so great as an actor to get the opportunity to do something that's incredibly truthful.
If I cry on telly, I'm genuinely crying. If it's a gritty scene it can come naturally.
I lose myself in my performances so I wouldn't say that I ever act on stage. I don't find it to be an acting drill for me. I just find it to be something very real that comes from a very gut-driven, honest place.
She didn't need to go to acting school to learn that the essence of acting is to act like you're not acting.
Working with Katherine Hepburn, she said to me, "Don't act." She said, "Read the lines. Just be. Just speak the lines." I said, "Okay." She said, "You look good. You got a good pair of shoulders, you got a good head, good face."
A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.
I like, as a director and a spectator, simple, direct, frank films. Nothing disgusts me more than snobbism, mannerism, technical gratuity... and, most of all, intellectualism.
The moment I do any puppy dog acting, I think the joke is dead. It's in the truth of how I play it, and the real painful honesty that I approach my performance with.
You work for it. You don't have to massage it, so that it fits into the way it has to be. He's just too vigorous a writer and the dialogue is too sparking to do anything other than inhabit it and give it as much truth as you can. You just try to make it part of your DNA. That's what the challenge is, really.
