Quotessence
Home / Quotes / A Quotes

A Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All A Quotes

“Actors read lines and change their facial expressions. Even then they usually need a director to tell them how to do it. It could be argued that actors are not creators or are at best secondary creators. Actors create something from something, usually a prewritten script. Whereas sculptors will create something from the raw material of the earth only using their hands and no other tools. In this regard sculptors are higher creators than painters, and painters are higher creators than musicians or writers who use symbols and tools to create. Actors however are the lowest of all creators. Perhaps that helps to explain why Hitchcock said, “Actors should be treated as cattle.”

“Actors such as Cagney, Robinson and Bogart seem to gather within themselves the qualities of the genres they appear in, so that the violence, suffering and angst of the films is restated in their faces, physical presence, movement and speech. By the curious alchemy of the cinema, each successive appearance in a given genre further solidifies the actor's screen persona until they no longer play a role but assimilate it to the collecive entity made up of their own body, personality and past screen roles. For instance, the beat-up face. tired eyes and rasping voice by which we identify Humphrey Bogart are, in part, selections we have made from his roles as Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and others.”

“Actors tend to get in their own way, a lot. A lot of times you will do things that will screw up your audition process. I was very bad at auditioning, and I always went in to it saying ‘God I hope I don’t screw this up.’ But at the same time, the directors are saying, ‘God, I hope this person is the savior.’ You have to remember is that the worst thing that could happen is you don’t get the job you don’t already have.”