Character Quotes - Page 584

The process of acting is no different [playing human or ape]. You're embodying the character. You're creating the psychology and the physicality. You're living the moment.

No matter how extreme things get, it still has that ring of truth about it that backs the characters - even though they're despicable and what they're doing isn't right you still care for their fate.

Part of why I think I have so much fun working in the mockumentary genre is that you can cut to pretty much anything at any time. People are now so conditioned to watch documentaries - they know how they operate, and that you can introduce a new character by cutting to them, and now they're in it. Similarly, being able to treat a sidebar idea that has nothing to do with your main story really seriously, the way the rest of it is being treated - all the pomp and circumstances lend themselves, I feel, to making comedy feel really earned and funnier and weirder.

Wong Kar Wai is a very intense character, very personable, and I believe in general he does not like and he would not want his actors to show their true looks and their true personality on screen.

I believe at the end of my career I'll be retired into the recurring character hall of fame.

I get some acting jobs. I like it other than the constant slipping in and out of character.

If anything, in the podcast world, I'm relieved that I don't have to dress like the character. I don't necessarily have to do all of the physicality that conveys the character, but do as much as I need to help me feel like the character.

In sketch comedy, wear your character like a hat, not a suit of armor.

I prefer not to wink out from behind the character as myself, saying to the audience, "It's just me here, right, guys?" Peter Sellers is my model, and he didn't do that - he wore his character from head to toe.

I really enjoy just being an actor. It's fun to be surprised by someone else's writing and to collaborate in creating a character and to leave all the hard decision-making to some other room full of suckers!

You ought to be able to wear your character like a Lycra bodysuit.

All s, like all human beings, get many things wrong. Ronald Reagan's extraordinary achievement as of the U.S. was to succeed in getting the two biggest challenges of his time right: defeating the Soviet Union and reviving the American economy and spirit. Neither of those achievements was inevitable. Both were fiercely opposed at the time. But he persisted; his visionary focus matched only by a gentleness of character and a brilliance of rhetoric.

I do sometimes play characters that are a bit ambiguous. You've got to be brave about that sort of stuff. I like the sense of people not feeling too secure, not immediately knowing what they have in front of them.

The kind of actors I admire move through different characters and genres.

When I was a kid, there were hardly any gay story lines or characters on television that I recall. Then when I was in college, 'Will & Grace' started up.

In fiction, it's as if you enter a dream world that you created, but your characters have their own free will. They don't do what you want them to do - they get into trouble, do drugs, fight over petty things, and do outrageous things that you wouldn't want your children to do. In other words, you can only provide the background, the seeds - in my case the background of the Vietnamese refugee.

The collection is a labor of love and devotion, and whenever I found free time from my journalism work, I'd work on one story or another, or at least sketch out my characters, and research various issues related to my characters' dilemmas.

One of the best things about reading comic books, when you're a kid or an adult, is watching the characters cross-over. What happens in one book affects the other, and these shows are so tightly knit that it feels like one giant show.

The murderer only takes the life of the parent and leaves his character as a goodly heritage to his children, whilst the slanderer takes away his goodly reputation and leaves him a living monument to his children's disgrace.

I'd love to adapt more contemporary novels. But there isn't really enough story and character to make a really satisfying serial, so they tend to be single dramas.

Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.

In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character.

I don't want to take shots at professional actors, because obviously the great ones are great. But I do think that given the kind of stories I've been telling in my films, it's hard for me to imagine how professional actors would have done better. And it's easy for me to imagine how they would have done worse. Because I think a lot of what an actor is trained to do and a lot of what an actor's instincts point toward is clarification, is always making it clear what's happening in the story, how the character fits into the scene, what the character wants.

Norman is a very up-close, personal, character drama and I'd like to do something more zoomed out, a little more pastoral, some sweeping epic. I'd like to try something different.

Making a documentary, there are thousands of choices, all the time: the angles and the pace and the choice of characters, the choice of music.