Quotes About Actors

For less powerful actors to reject work is just a waste of time and money - pointless.

I used to drive up from theatre in Michigan to Stratford, Ontario to watch every show. I idolized the actors from Stratford. I was very influenced by them because they would come down and work at my theatre and get time on their American Equity union cards.

Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to and watch the directors direct.

As most actors/actresses, I don't like to watch my own movies, either, and I never look at the dailys while filming.

I always direct next to the camera and watch my actors, and so you can see the small things that you can't see on the small screen but you can definitely see on the big screen.

For hundreds of years, that was the major form of entertainment: The grown-ups sat around and watched the kids play. Now they sit around and watch the television. The actors are the kids.

I watched so many comic book movies where the actors weren't as built as the characters in the book. It made me mad because they didn't look right.

I did quite a lot of fencing when I was a kid. I was a swimmer, and I played a lot of basketball. I was a fencer for Great Britain, but I only did that because I watched 'Robin Hood,' 'Star Wars,' 'Highlander' and 'The Three Musketeers,' and I wanted to emulate Richard Harris and the great British actors that I grew up watching.

Everything's cyclical. Having been raised by actors, I watched their careers, and the challenge is to take time off.

Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Will Ferrell, those guys mean so much to me because I watched those guys and how they transform and watch the commitment to what they do. I admire them.

This really should be kept secret, but you can learn a lot by watching the making-of DVDs. Every actor should do it. You figure out what you're dealing with.

I don't think any actor feels comfortable watching themselves in movies. You must be very narcissistic. The problem with your own opinion of yourself is that contrary to the normal spectators, when you watch a film you are in, you only watch yourself.

I don't get the point in a lot of biopics, they're boring. You know what's gonna happen. You're just watching actors show off.

I think the other honest attraction was that I just grew up loving watching TV and loving watching film, and there's so many directors and actors that I dreamed of working with, I just really wanted to take a crack at it and see if I could ever work with some of those.

When I think of character actors, I think of Spencer Tracy; I think of Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall. When I was a young lad watching films, my eyes were on them - watching 'On the Waterfront,' my eyes are on Rod Steiger and Karl Malden, not on Brando.

I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world.

I have never had trouble with any actor being able to visualise things. They are amazing. As long as you have your monster head on a long stick, so you can hold it up there and you can wave it around and let them see it and explain it to them, they are just great.

I have been fortunate to get different types of work, but by and large till 90s for actors like me there were not many opportunities besides playing brother of the heroine or friend of the hero or young college villain after the earlier new wave was consumed by television.

John loved celebrity. We attended an American Film Institute dinner honoring James Cagney, and the room was filled with famous actors like Mae West, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne and Steve McQueen. John was like a kid in a candy store.

When I was a kid going to the movies, we'd go because Bogart was in the movie, or Cagney, or John Wayne. We didn't know what the story was about or anything.

You know for years before the notion of sequels, actors were the franchise. John Wayne would rarely do sequels, but he kind of played the same guy with a different name in every movie. I have no problem with using actors as franchises. And that's what is fun to do.

My favorite actors when I was a kid were in their '60s. Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne.

Robert Mitchum sounded different from John Wayne, and John Wayne sounded different from Clark Gable.

Oh my God... I worked with George C. Scott, way before 'Chips,' in 'The New Centurion.' I co-star in that movie. It was great working with him. I worked with Charlton Heston, Glenn Ford, Robert Mitchum. Stacy Each. The old Hollywood. I met John Wayne, and that was a thrill. I was working next door to him.