Quotes About Interpretation

As an actor you have to bring to the table your creative input. But when a director like Ridley Scott says I want you to do this this way, you know when he gets to the editing room he has a reason for it. It's like watching a masterpiece.

The beauty of any artwork is that it becomes the person that's watching it: What do you take out of it?

Seeing, say, 'My Left Foot,' and 'The Last of the Mohicans.' How is that the same person? Or people like Johnny Depp, who can play Jack Sparrow and Edward Scissorhands. I am so interested in the transformation, in not knowing anything about them and watching somebody create a character. I'm not really interested in personalities.

As an actor, you pay attention very closely to everything that happens to you, and you're constantly watching others as well, trying to just find out where everything comes from.

Everyone sees something different in 'Endgame': a biblical apocalypse, a portrait of painful co-dependency, a confession of guilt and dignity in the face of death, a night of baffling hopelessness, a meaningless babble. Each interpretation reveals an absurd truth - not about the play, but about the person watching it.

A lot of my work is about what's abstract and what's pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.

I've always been a scientist in terms of watching basketball. I like to dissect it all.

It's very different when you're reading a script to when you're watching a movie for the first time.

When I'm watching somebody act, it's a behavior editorial function - I look at someone act, and I might say, 'I don't believe him when he says that.' I don't know why I don't believe him, probably because the people that I've met, they don't act like that when they say stuff like that and mean it.

If you're watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you're not watching it in a theatre? If you watch a TV show on your iPad, is it no longer a TV show? The device and the length are irrelevant; the labels are useless, except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers, who use these labels to conduct business deals.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

Acting - you're taking someone else's visions and someone else's inspirations, and it's up to you to portray that to everyone watching the film.

I find that you learn from others. It's very much about watching TV and watching movies for me and grasping that way and watching other people act.

I always say, I'm certain I changed 'Watchmen' less than the Coen brothers changed 'No Country for Old Men.' I'm certain of it. But you don't hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It's like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

The challenge with 'Watchmen' is making sure that the ideas that were in the book got into the movie. That was my biggest stretch. I wanted people to watch the movie and get it. It's one of those things where, over time, it has happened more.

Jesus walking on water is an allegory, not fluid mechanics. God destroying the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah is a warning, not a historical battle. Doubting Thomas is an example, not a person. The story of Noah, with all of its scientific and historical impossibilities, can be read the same way.

Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Only once in the last thirty years have I made a duplicate, and that was a watercolor from my oil picture now owned by the Layton Art Gallery, Milwaukee, called 'Hark! the Lark.'

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

In hindsight, Watergate was a curse as well as a blessing for American journalism. The courageous reporting of the 'Post' and the 'New York Times' - coupled with the favourable Supreme Court rulings on publication of the Pentagon Papers - were landmarks for the interpretation of First Amendment rights and the freedom of the press.

'The Pink Lady' rides the Freudian wave. You know, the big lady, the relationship to mom - those things are obviously part of that piece.

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 songs that define characters from each film of mine. It can be a song from that particular film or something that just goes with the wavelength of the film; you listen to it, and it gives you that rhythm. I can't articulate how it helps, but it somehow gives you an understanding of the character.