actors Quotes

What I find sometimes that is tricky is if actors are using too much of their own life in a picture, in a scene, they get locked into a particular way to play the scene, and it lacks an immediacy.

You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

You know, whatever happens between the two of us that's created when we come together as actors is not something I think we can explain.

When actors get pigeonholed, that's their own doing to a large degree. Because if you do something that people like, obviously they're going to ask you to do it again. It's up to you to say no. If you're that insecure about working, you'll probably do what you're known to do.

After 9/11 and the impending actors' strike of a few years ago, roles dried up for everyone.

I've often said there's two kinds of actors. There's a more gregarious type and the shy type.

I've worked with the greatest actors, and they're all gone. This is what's so desperate to me.

You know, actors are fans, too. And talent is very attractive to me.

Most actors feel only one way. We're just grateful to have a job.

There's a lot of us idiot actors that get tattoos and they cover them with makeup when you do a film.

A lot of actors flame out.

I studied acting for 10 years before I went for an audition. I studied with Lee Strasberg and Actors Studio teachers, and went to the High School of Performing Arts.

I walk the streets, take the train, it's real simple. Some actors create their own mythology: 'Oh, I'm so famous I can't go places, because I created this mythology that I'm so famous I can't go places.

I've always played the guy with the gun and the knife. That's how many actors start out, playing the bad guy.

Oh, man, pop singers are terrible actors. We're all bad.

The camera can move, you can make the shots, blah blah blah, but as long as the actors are good, you have something.

And I realized that directing actors is really important because that's what ends up on screen.

A lot of actors think that the more lines they have the more attention they get. That's bullshit. I make people look at me. I don't have to say a lot of words.

I call this book The Intent to Live because great actors don't seem to be acting, they seem to be actually living.

Very often there's this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.

Actors often behave like children, and so we're taken for children. I want to be grown up.

What I promise to my actors, and to my director, is to give them the salary and everything they need.

So often actors only mix with actors, which is quite incestuous, and doesn't give them the insight into how other people work.

Ninety-eight per cent of actors who actually make a living do so in front of a camera.

So many of these comics are just frustrated singers or actors - they want to get a gig doing a sitcom. It's paint-by-the-numbers comedy, lame joke-telling. They're drawn to it as a career move.

All of them - my father, mother, step-mother, and grandmother - were all wonderful actors and performers and they are an inspiration to me, both in their craft and in their humanity.

There's always an imbalance with actors and actresses in the industry. And I think because there are just fewer movies overall being made, it's that trickle down effect.

I would love to get great performances from actors as a director, because that's what I'm always looking for, a director that's going to help me go places I've never been before.

If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it's because I put the character first.

The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage.