Quotes About Craft

I was trained on the stage, and I can do stage as well as I can do movies, but I prefer films.

The skill set that I think we have as actors is so cool because they train you in ways that you never thought you'd be trained. And that's skills that they can't take back. So as you go further in your career, you can dump all these skills into things.

I am not a very trained actor.

Acting is too often looked upon as a 'gifted art.' This may be, but having the gift is only the beginning. It must be honed, developed by training and experience.

You've got to have charisma and other things in addition to athleticism. But I've got my background in fitness, I've done my training and put time in to develop my craft. So I can push the envelope with those seductive storylines but still show people that I can kick butt, too.

I don't think actors get good training today. I put my training to use in everything I do.

I think there is no better training than being onstage because here's the thing: the theater requires you to act with your whole body. I think acting with your whole body gives you a root, and you can build from there.

Even great actors who transform who they are still go to a really honest place; I think that's sort of that special skill that actors have.

I never had a thing for movie stars. I was into the guys who could transform. Sean Penn. Daniel Day-Lewis. The ones who privileged the craft.

When I talk about character work, I don't really feel like i do much as an actor when I look at other great actors who win big awards for doing incredible transformations.

Actors act... Their job is to become this character. And I have, in fact, seen Sam Heughan become Jamie and Caitriona Balfe become Claire right before my eyes. It was an astonishing transformation.

I explain at the parties that I believe knitting is a transformative and intriguing act that can change the life and brain of the person doing it, and that knitting is a perfect metaphor for life and insight into some better ways through it.

The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.

After I finish writing a chapter, I'll print it out, cut it up into paragraphs, and cut away any transition sentences. Then I shuffle all the paragraphs and lay them out as they come. As I arrange and hold them next to each other, very quickly a natural structure for the chapter presents itself.

Film and television is just a different technique in terms of how to approach the camera but basically the job is the same; but what you learn as a craft in theater, you can then learn to translate that into any mediums.

I'm not the kind of actor that can go completely cold into an emotional scene. I have to transport myself emotionally by whatever means possible, and that basically means you carry the situation with you all week, all episode or all day beforehand.

A writer has to squelch his emotional reactions consciously in order to get enough distance to use them in his work as a writer.

"Heirloom" is knitting code for "This pattern is so difficult that you would consider death a relief.

imagine a scarf as an unlimited canvas

ribbing, moss, seed, and garter are all balanced and combine the yin and yang of knitting

I recognize that knitting can improve my mood in trying circumstances

A half finished shawl left on the coffee table isn't a mess; it's an object of art.

I think one of the major things a director has to do is to know his subject matter, the subject matter of his script, know the truth and the reality of it. That's very important.