Stanislavski Method Quotes

I'm not that complicated as an actor. I have a formula in which I work, yeah. But not like Sean Penn does. Sean is one of the few actors I know who can work like that, actually becoming the character he is playing, and get consistent results. I don't believe you can ever be someone else. You manifest different levels of your own personality to come up with a character.

A great actor is simply just seeing him or herself, and reacting to what exists around them.

I was a serious method actor until I visited this site.

Going on to train with Lecoq in Paris meant I discovered European theatre at a formative moment growing up.

I remember in one of my early films I had a drunk scene. It was Kiss Me Goodbye, with Sally Field, and I was playing this kind of nerdy guy who gets drunk and dances. And so I thought, "Oh well, I'll just get drunk and do the dance." And it was wonderful, but then I had the rest of the day, and the next day. So I learned that you don't really have to do the things that your character is doing. But us actors, we use something called sense memory. I've certainly been drunk before, and part of my job is to recall that without getting drunk.

Bette Davis had a phrase that called it "cigarette smoking acting" .

I love acting. I just love it. It's in my bones. I remember when I was a kid, I watched an interview with Dennis Hopper talking about Jimmy Dean on the set of Rebel Without A Cause. Jimmy said to him, "If you've got to cry in a scene, you've got to cry. Make it real." And that's all that I believe in.

Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you've been blessed.

Modern acting is method acting, most of it. And there are sort of different schools, so I guess I'm not really from one school or another. I had a number of different teachers but they were all kind of drawing from the same pool, which is - What do you want? What are you doing to get what you want? And, what is in the way? These are basic acting questions. Knowing the answers to those questions. So you're talking about objectives and actions and obstacles. That's a sort of shorthand that gives you a language.

At drama school I learned the Stanislavski technique, which uses sentimental memories and bits of your past to put real emotion into the scene.

I did all the dialect work, all my character work completely by myself.

I went to drama school in the U.K., where we did endless Chekov plays.

I'm always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.

Method actors are absolutely terrible. They want to direct themselves, and it's a disaster.

I never contemplated. I just went in there and did my acting. I never thought, "What's the character actually feeling here? What's he trying to get across?" And never looked at it from that classically trained actor's point of view.

The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.

Actually I want to scare away method actors because it's a pain. It's like, 'Come on, what are you doing? It's not real. What are you doing? Oh, you're really brooding. Okay, good. Go to your trailer. I'll see you in an hour.'

I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most.

Accents influence a performance. If you look at Stanislavski, he says work from the in to the out, and I probably overall work the other way. I find an accent and a mood, and that influences the character massively.

My advice to any actor who's playing, quote, unquote, "extra" to think of it more like Stanislavski did. It's not a small part. You are the lead in the movie, in your own movie.

I'm not a method actor. I can't even explain so much what I do.

I still do a form of sense memory. It honestly depends on the job. It depends on the other people you're working with, how the other actor works. It's take a little from here, take a little from there.

I am not one of those actors who dwells on the histrionics and the subtext and future text of the character. I deal with the scenes that I'm doing at that specific time, because if I do that, they play in more of a real way.

I'm not a method actress.

I was never a part of the Actor's Studio, because two friends of mine started it in 1947 and by that time I'd gone to California.