actors Quotes

Perhaps society should give actors the same sort of protection it gives to those who follow a religious life. Actor/priest was originally the same job. The theater is left wing magic and theology is right wing magic.

Most actors nowadays are models turned actors. That's why a lot of young actors are terrible. You have to learn how to act. It is not something that you can just do.

It is dreadful to see actors reproducing the same image constantly.

For us, as actors, and even for the director, it gave us a sense of authenticity to what we were doing because we were talking about Hollywood and we were in Hollywood

Maybe I'll put my iPod in two minutes before. But truly, I've listened to actors say that they loved to listen to music before a shot, and I really understand that now because it puts you in the mood and gives you energy

If two actors have an equal creative give and take between them, it translates beautifully on the screen.

I'm a huge movie buff, so I'm a fan of a lot of actors and actresses.

Shooting in real-life situations helps actors because they're competing against the noise and the wind. Out of that comes things that shift and change, in terms of tone, but not in terms of re-honing the whole sequence.

There's this freshness that happens within the first few takes of the actors actually listening to each other and actually really reacting.

Every day, I wake up and I'm like, \'Oh, I'm the star of my own show that has my name in it and I get to write it and hire actors that I've loved for such a long time!\' It's amazing!

It's really important to me that the actors bring a lot of elements of the characters to the process so they own it, so it's personal to them, so it's not just me saying, \'You stand here, you say this, you do this, you feel this.\' No, you bring it up from in here and then let's work with that.

There are so many dramatic actors where I would give all of my anything to have their careers, but I don't think I can try to follow anyone.

As actors you're always afraid to go too far but Lasse Hallstrom wants you to go too far. He wants you to do it wrong, to be over-the-top, and that's so freeing to be able to think 'Now I can try and be bad'. There's no pressure on you and you don't feel you can make a mistake.

I think people when they think of comedic actors they forget that they are people with a point of view and experiences and depth.

Chicago actors are hard-nosed. They're tough on themselves and their fellow actors. They're self-demanding.

I'm an actor, and part of my joy and my curiosity about the job that I do, is that actors have the privilege of exploring human nature in different ways.

Actors are as good as they allow themselves to be, and to portray life, you have to have as broad an experience of it as you possibly can, so everything's worth it.

The celebrity mill is so active these days that actors can make careers out of being themselves, and I don't know that I want to. I think I'm just figuring out how to make a career out of not being myself. It's hard.

Comedic actors can be looked at as a lower form because we have to put ourselves in a lower place than most of the audience. I think lofty emotions are somehow considered more special. The best stories in the world to me are the ones that elicit a real emotion, but have humour.

As a director/writer/producer, all you ever want is to work with actors who make you look better, who make the work you do seem as good as it can be and even better than it is.

There are too many stars and too few actors.

I'm not one of those actors who's very good at having a list of roles that I want to play someday - which is bad, because I really need to do it. I have people in theaters ask me what I want to do and I don't have an answer!

If you put on a lousy production with white actors, it's lousy. There is a problem, or can be, at this stage of our social evolution, with mixing the casts. It may not be a question of race so much as class. You would rarely find a black man in a high executive position where he was swinging his weight around.

What I love in working on film is just working with actors. It's one thing to write scenes alone over a keyboard and to imagine the actions and reactions in your head, but it's a completely other thing to hear actors speaking your words, to see their bodies bringing the fullness of emotion, need, desire and pain to life right in front of you. It's amazing.

I understand the formula that producers hire directors and directors are hired to direct and actors are hired to act. I don't have any conflict with any directors because I know they're the boss.

I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people's shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be - to not try to look at the world in a sense of \'I'm not going to judge somebody. I'm going to try to understand who they are and what they're about.\'

Typically, I like to talk and meet with actors face to face well before we start shooting.

If actors are making a little film with me at 2am in Nashville, they're not doing it to get paid. They're doing it because there's something special about the characters, which helps the film become more interesting.

I know that some great actors can transform, and that's fine. But I come from the school of thought that people put a version of themselves in their films.

To me, the screenplay only becomes the Bible of the film after the actors have been cast.