Film Acting Quotes

I've dealt with a few method actors, and I don't know if should say this, but I think it's a bunch of nonsense. I think it's film acting and you just have to be on when the camera is rolling. ~ Natalie Portman

Here is something no real celebrity will ever tell you: film acting is not very fun. Doing the same thing over and over again until, in the director's eyes, you 'get it right' does not allow for very much creative freedom ... In terms of sheer adrenaline, film has absolutely nothing on theater. ~ Mara Wilson

The foundation for film acting is stage acting. ~ James Lipton

Theater to me is acting but it's more real on film. ~ Ted Shackelford

I got into film acting because I wanted to be James Dean. We lost him at a very young age - he was only 24 - but I'm in my fifthies, so there's only so many times you can act like James Dean. I had to find new ways of expressing myself that kept me fascinated with film performance. ~ Nicolas Cage

The only people who have doubts about the sincerity of my music are people who come to it relatively late, off the back of having seen me in a film. Acting is about being other people, and music is about being myself. ~ Riz Ahmed

I was working more on a primal, instinctive level. And it just seemed to suit me; it seemed to suit my concentration span, it seemed to suit my personal style of performance, and I have fallen in love with film acting. ~ Ron Perlman

You can see all sorts of things in film acting if you know where to look and what to look for. One thing I often notice is that the actor is looking for his mark, the place where he has to stand to be in the right place in the shot. ~ Michael Caine

I've learnt that there's acting for film, acting for theatre, and acting for an audition. ~ Sarah Snook

That to me is what my idea of film acting should be. There shouldn't be any acting. You should just be watching a real person. ~ Michael Caine

That's the thing about film acting and television acting. You just release yourself and do what is true for the moment, and ignore everybody and everything and all the technical razzmatazz that goes on. ~ David Suchet

An actor should never be larger than the film he's in. ~ Christian Bale

I had a really great experience so far with film acting. And most experiences from most actors, I've heard, are not like this. But I want a career that has many disciplines and many options. ~ Thomas Horn

Film acting has been a very pure experience, because you have to give the purest form of yourself as an artist. ~ Dwight Yoakam

And film acting is incredibly tedious, just by its nature. It's incredibly, mind numbingly slow. ~ Hugh Grant

Film acting is one of the only industries where you're criticized for working hard. In any other industry, it's considered a quality and something to behold. ~ Nicolas Cage

The difference - the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive. ~ James Lipton

Every time I've crossed to a new level of film acting, the film has been a breakthrough project. ~ Anupam Kher

Film acting, if you don't play the lead, you come, and you do your scenes in a few days, and you act with a couple of colleagues. All the rest of the actors you never see, and you don't even meet many of them. And you don't know what will happen with what you've done. Maybe it will be in the film, maybe it will not. ~ Max Von Sydow

Film acting would be about 80 percent better than it has been lately if actors did their homework, if they didn't have egos that took the size of their talent for granted. ~ Rod Steiger

Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play. ~ Sam Shepard

With acting, there is a level of anonymity which is conducive to your profession. There are examples of very public people who are on the cover of every celebrity magazine but can't open a film. ~ Sienna Miller

I'd love to work with the people who really got the film industry going again through the '70s: Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, Fred Schepisi. ~ David Wenham

The way I see the job, my definition of it, is to create characters to the best of your ability and then fit into what's trying to be accomplished in the general framework of the film. I think that's whether you're doing this- even if you're doing musical theater. That's what I think an actors job is. I don't know. I like to think what an actors job is is to create characters. ~ Anton Yelchin

I love theatre because it's just me and the audience. It's the litmus test in acting, to be able to sustain a performance over one, two or three hours. ~ Helen McCrory

I'd love to work in America, some of my favourite films come from America. ~ Cillian Murphy

Perhaps I lost sight of my dreams when I became an adult and resigned myself to acting the way adults were supposed to act. ~ Robin S. Sharma

Everyone is acting from his own level of consciousness. This is all we can ask of ourselves or anyone else. However hurtful someone is, he is doing the best he can, given the limits of his consciousness. ~ Deepak Chopra

Thinking globally while acting locally is the habitual practice of many women all around the world. It is a habit we can preserve, revive, and practice consciously and articulately so that we and the women around us will take heart, develop pride in womanhood, and thrive. ~ Dee L.R. Graham

Music and acting kind of all goes together. ~ Drake Bell

I don't get much studio stuff. I'm usually on location, and I know that some people think that acting is so glamorous, but believe me, it's not! ~ Emilia Clarke

I didn't have the money to put myself through drama school, so I thought - naively - that if I wrote a play and put it on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, agents would see me and that would be my ticket to Hollywood. I wrote a musical; an acting coach saw it and put me on his course for free while I wrote for his company. ~ Neil Jackson

If you're not bruised up, then you're not doing an action film in a real way. ~ Mads Mikkelsen

Film can be exciting, but more often, it's tedious. ~ Mara Wilson

I still think of myself as a stage actor. When I do film and television I try to implement what I was taught to do in theatre, to try to stretch into characters that are far from myself. ~ Tony Shalhoub

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend. ~ Jeff Bridges

I want all of my films to belong to me. ~ Alexander Payne

I love film, but it's bringing me away from music. Singing is what I'm probably most passionate about. ~ Mandy Moore

Recently, I took my son to see The Haunted Mansion, which was one of the worst things (I hesitate even to call it a movie) that I have ever seen. He thought it was better than Finding Nemo and we had a fruitless argument which I'm sure made him acutely aware of the disadvantages of having a film critic for a dad. ~ A.O. Scott

If you make a feelgood film which is complete candyfloss, where everybody is good and everything is beautiful and hunky dory, it won't appeal to the audience. ~ Anil Kapoor

Acting was something I had to do. ~ Nancy Marchand

I think that the success of the film is as much about it being something that families could share as anything else. ~ J.J. Abrams

I could never be a part of an adaptation of a film where there's pressure to not disappoint the immense fan base. In those cases, they often wind up with filmed books on tape, quite uncinematic. Having said that, I'd say all the adaptations I've done are quite faithful to the original. You have to pick and choose which storylines and plot threads, because you don't have the time to kill in the film as they have in novels. All those pages with detours and plots and different storylines. But films add a lot, and you gotta keep it moving. ~ Alexander Payne

It was a real sort of synergistic 'Aha!' moment when I started acting. ~ Pete Ploszek

Both music and acting are huge parts of my life - it's all about balance. ~ Victoria Justice

I warmly recommend to you the films of poets. ~ Francois Truffaut

I get bored with the same old film coming out every weekend. It feels like it's the same story all the time, and the same visuals, and the characters' dilemmas are remarkably similar. ~ Josh Hartnett

I started acting because I enjoyed school plays. ~ Mayim Bialik

Technology will need to make many more huge leaps before one can ever view films with the level of picture and sound quality many film lovers demand without having to slide a disc into a player, especially with the technical requirements of today's 3D movies. ~ Ridley Scott

When I was a young actor I was in a lot of film doing one day work and two days' work, and they've included all those titles, which I don't even remember. I think I've played the lead in about 75 movies. ~ Michael Caine

When you're younger, and you do your first or second film, you want to show everyone what you can do. ~ Philippe Falardeau

I'm completely self-taught. I absolutely don't believe in art or film schools! ~ Tom Six

Even with college, the reason I wanted to go so badly is because I wanted to major in film. I want to take screenwriting classes and learn more about behind the scenes stuff, because I love people like Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig who are able to write a lot of their own material and be so involved in everything they do. ~ Miranda Cosgrove

I actually don't see that strong of a connection between my background as a rock 'n roller and my early films. In a way I think your musical identity in film work is determined by the jobs that come your way. ~ Cliff Martinez

There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence. ~ Jose Saramago

A person with less knowledge and more self-confidence (which is primarily a way of thinking and acting) will often run circles around a person with more knowledge and less self-confidence; which means that self-confidence has the upper hand to knowledge when it comes to acting in the world. It has been interesting to see many of my star academic students struggle with teaching in the real world, while others who were less qualified in the academic field but had more self-confidence have gone out and positively affected many more people through their teaching. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe. ~ Ingmar Bergman

A good [film] director is talented, imaginative, and does his homework. ~ Vilmos Zsigmond

I never thought of what I was doing as a way to sell the NFL. I was making movies about a sport that I loved, about players and coaches that I respected. I wanted to convey my love of the game through film. And most artists convey their love through art. And my art and my love was expressed through film. ~ Steve Sabol

Everyone sort of feels alienated at that point, so it's hard to say whether I felt like that because everyone does or because I was so focused on acting [since the age of 8]. ~ Alycia Debnam Carey

Sometimes it really is the end of the world. Sure, everything's continuing the same as it ever did, but there's been a shift. Suddenly, you don't know what the rules are. People will do things that leave you baffled. Or maybe you'll surprise yourself, start acting like a person you don't recognize. And you have to live in it now, this new world. You can't ever go back. ~ Janet E. Cameron

Parents who can feel, who are conscious of their feelings and realize that uncontrolled anger, though it may be triggered by the child, usually has little to do with it, are less in danger of acting out their rage in the guise of pedagogy. I use the words "guilt" and "victim," rather than "causes" and "effects," as I am often politely urged to do, advisedly. Children are turned into victims by people, by their parents, not by some kind of automaton. These people have no right to behave as though they were merely destructive automatons and adhere to their ignorance, even though conventional wisdom and even moral and religious teachings confirm them in their actions by preaching forgiveness to their victims. One day the effects of such opinions will be seen in all their destructiveness. ~ Alice Miller

I was the Chair of the WIFF Foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of Women In Film. The foundation runs the several programs including one that provide our film finishing fund. So we help women complete their films with a grant from Netflix. It's great to be associated with award winning films like 'Freeheld' and 'Circumstance'. ~ Sharon Lawrence