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Vote:   | A cello's soul is the resonance that makes it unique: how it was made, when it was made, who's played it. Mine may be who my parents were, what I know about life, who I love and have loved. All that makes my bones resonate. If a director is fortunate enough to tap into that, it's an endless well of information. |
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Vote: | All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour. |
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Vote: | As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I'd still be alive by now. |
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Vote: | As an actor there's no autonomy, unless you're prepared to risk the possibility of starving. |
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Vote: | Being a leading man on a film set under the direction of somebody like Dickie Attenborough is very empowering, and you have to be extremely careful how you use that power. |
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Vote: | But comedy I'd love to do as much as humanly possible. |
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Vote: | But filming is good for you, because the crew isn't allowed to laugh. You can't get addicted to getting the laugh. |
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Vote: | By the time I was 22, I was at Chichester Festival Theatre, and at 22 auditioned for Trevor Nunn, bless him, who, when I was 23, allowed me to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. |
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Vote: | Certainly I was aware of the comradeships that were forged during the film. |
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Vote: | Everything that's made me what I am today is part of that process of being intrigued and curious. But I really couldn't put my finger on any specific trigger from my childhood. |
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Vote: | Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It's harder. |
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Vote: | Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't. |
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Vote: | Great drama deals with the struggle for people's selves. You see it on the screen. Everyone is involved with the struggle with their own soul, struggling for that soul and to possess that soul. |
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Vote: | Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence. |
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Vote: | Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn't going to work. |
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Vote: | I always try to find something I admire about every character I play. |
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Vote: | I always try to make whatever character I'm playing a completely whole human being, with integrity, morality-or the lack of. I try to give the audience an opportunity of looking at the screen and recognising something. |
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Vote: | I am not a classical actor; I am an entertainer. I fell into classical acting by mistake and actually started out as a singer. I wrote the music for a musical play and it transferred to London and I sang the songs in London. |
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Vote: | I am-hello!-an actor, an entertainer, a song-and-dance man. can do anything. |
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Vote: | I didn't go to drama school because, from the first refusal I then, as I said, a couple of weeks later, was offered a professional job, where I am immensely grateful to the journey. |
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Vote: | I do have a massive curiosity. |
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Vote: | I do remember, as a child, that I always imagined, when I was maybe 6 or 7, my fantasy was that everywhere I went I was being followed by an invisible film crew. |
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Vote: | I don't honestly think people know what acting is. |
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Vote: | I don't think that making ourselves invulnerable to feeling any onslaught to our feelings will help us in life, ultimately. I think we only learn and grow by allowing ourselves to be really challenged by those feelings that do overwhelm us occasionally. |
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Vote: | I enjoy this status so much, feeling that I'm close to the heart of the tribe as an actor, a storyteller, a troubadour, but socially quite distant because I don't fit into any particular comfortable slot. |
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Vote: | I found the absolute thrill of translating ancient poetic text into totally visceral, tangible and even relevant, immediate and urgent language... I was thrilled by Shakespeare. It surprised me, my profound delight in deciphering Shakespeare and making it completely flesh-and-blood. |
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Vote: | I have a rather naive approach, I think, to my job. |
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Vote: | I have done three makeup tests and I'm very, very happy with them. I am completely unrecognizable. |
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Vote: | I have never felt bereft of anything. |
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Vote: | I have no misconceptions about my dentist because when I go to my dentist I see what he does... Nobody can really understand the process of acting because... we don't want them to. |
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Vote: | I honestly have no strategy whatsoever. I'm waiting for that script to pop through the letterbox and completely surprise me. |
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Vote: | I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable. |
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Vote: | I just think that on the bedrock of his creative genius, there resided in Shakespeare a male psyche and a female psyche and that they both dwelled very creatively and energetically inside him. |
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Vote: | I just try to do the things that I respond to, that just grab me when I read them for whatever reason. It's hard to put your finger on it. |
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Vote: | I knew India not at all. I mean, I had never been before in my life. |
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Vote: | I like to do one or two films a year. But I can't prepare for something until I know what it's going to be. So I find that doing some narration, or maybe a documentary, is like going back into the gym for a couple of days. |
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Vote: | I love creatures in their pure form. |
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Vote: | I may return to the stage, but not in the foreseeable future. |
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Vote: | I might be asked to make an emotional expression which is me being absolutely, absolutely still and making maybe one movement, and there it is. |
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Vote: | I now see on the screen certain ways in which Gandhiji greets people, how he treats every single individual in his life as somebody precious, valued and never never to be humiliated, but uplifted and elevated. |
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Vote: | I think a great director is able to conclude things with grace... and I remember Gandhi ending in a very similar way. |
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Vote: | I think I'm more bonded, emotionally and in a craft sense, to films that tell extraordinary stories about extraordinary destinies. |
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Vote: | I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting. |
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Vote: | I think it's probably honest to say that there's a certain powerful stillness that I remember admiring tremendously as I grew up. And that would be Spencer Tracy... and Bogart and that particular approach to the work. The stillness, the economy, the grace of that work, so they would have been then, my heroes on the screen. |
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Vote: | I think one of my main moments of inspiration was when I was about 5. |
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Vote: | I think Romeo and Juliet is uplifting. That's how much a son wishes to avenge his father. That is how much two young people can love each other. |
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Vote: | I think that all of us either lose touch with the child inside us or try and hold onto it because it so precious to us and it's such an extraordinary part of our lives. |
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Vote: | I think that most actors, and they're a very strange lot actors, very strange people, but I think that they attempt to keep in touch with the child. |
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Vote: | I think that really the director should try and shape what is there. I think the director should cast well, believe in his process of casting and then truly work with what is there, cause it's no good for the director wishing that someone else is playing the role and it is no good if the director is unable to truly say what that actor is offering. |
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Vote: | I think that Shakespeare had his male side and his female side extremely well developed. And this was a great quality of the Elizabethan, all-around Renaissance man. They were not afraid of their male side and their female side co-existing. This somewhere along the line got lost. And then it got misunderstood. |
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Vote: | I think that the stamina, the marathon stamina that you required of your actor, I probably developed on great texts during my Shakespeare tenancy, if you like. |
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Vote: | I think that various styles and methods and approaches are an invention of people who don't understand the process of acting and who try very hard to label things. |
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Vote: | I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy... It's a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen. |
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Vote: | I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language. |
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Vote: | I told myself that I would not go back to the camps as an actor ever again, that I was very frightened of wearing a yellow star. It was fear, it was cowardice, I was. |
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Vote: | I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative. |
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Vote: | I try not to make it easy for myself. I try very hard to stay in the moment. I'm not an actor who psyches himself up for a take. I do the opposite. I actually try and reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce and get to what I call a flat line or a zero. |
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Vote: | I use my intuition, my imagination, my voice and my body. That is really what actors do. There is a lot of nonsense talked about acting, but really all we do is use our voice, our body, our imaginations to create portraits about people so that you and the audience can be pulled into beautiful stories. |
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Vote: | I was fortunate as a young actor, to go straight to the RSC, where I learned that being an actor can bring with it wonderful responsibilities. |
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Vote: | I was very lazy in the sixth form at school, I wasn't motivated properly, I handled it very badly and I was not given a place at university to study medicine. |
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Vote: | I wasn't particularly strong in the dramatic society, the drama group. I left Manchester Grammar School with abysmal A-level results. I then had a year's hiatus where I didn't know what to do at all. |
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Vote: | I would like to make it known, on this program, loud and clear, that I would absolutely embrace with all five of my arms being a Bond villain. |
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Vote: | I'm a hopping maniac, and if I didn't have that disciplined channel to pour this maniacal energy into, I'd probably go berserk. |
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Vote: | I'm convinced that had I not changed my name, I don't think I would have had quite the same career curve that I eventually had. |
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Vote: | I'm holding a mirror to the audience and telling them there is a violent person in all of us. |
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Vote: | I'm not very good at analysing past strategies and choices. |
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Vote: | I'm very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour. |
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Vote: | I've met holocaust survivor victims, through other films, and I know what survivor guilt is like. |
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Vote: | I've never had to turn my hand to anything for monetary gain, other than pretending to be somebody else. I'm deeply fortunate. |
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Vote: | If I were to play somebody who ran a fish and chip shop, I would not work in a fish and chip shop for three months. Staring at chips is not going to help me in my performance. |
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Vote: | If people are generous with their information, then the actor can use that information lovingly and respectfully. |
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Vote: | If the director wishes to print it, then you have a series of choices, maybe millions of choices within that minute-and-a-half, or 80 seconds, or 2 minutes or however long or short the take is, you have all those choices committed to celluloid. I find that absolutely thrilling. |
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Vote: | If we hit the collective nerve of the audience on that night, that they would be standing up and rushing towards the stage to hug us. |
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Vote: | If you start to victimise yourself, as an unworthy component in a beautifully constructed machine, that component is going to fail the machinery. |
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Vote: | If your best friend has stolen your girlfriend, it does become life and death. |
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Vote: | In cinema, the leading player is the director. |
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Vote: | In England, it's now Sir Ben. Mister has just disappeared. It's not even on my passport anymore. They've taken Mister away from me. |
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Vote: | In my own experience, in portraying other men and earning my money by pretending to be somebody else, it has stamped me with what the actor is-tribally central and socially peripheral. |
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Vote: | It doesn't get any easier. I still get very nervous and excited, but I'm hoping... what I'm trying to do is simplify. That's what I'm trying to do. |
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Vote: | It is better for me to serve a charity as an actor or a voice, rather than at a luncheon being just a celebrity. |
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Vote: | It would frighten me if I were to learn somewhere along the line that all of those emotions had been suppressed throughout my entire life, that would be very scary, because nature would express them, somehow, in some form. |
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Vote: | It's always very touching when you find a character on the screen who is fiercely defending your character. |
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Vote: | It's very difficult to be objective about one's childhood because you have no perspective on it. I have nothing to compare it with. The only way I can lead any kind of a comparative life is to portray other men. |
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Vote: | John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London. |
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Vote: | Maybe it's not a very businesslike approach, but it's always what attracts me... I do believe that it is that energy, that wonderful energy of the ancient craft of storytelling that will ignite something in the listeners. |
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Vote: | Moses had a very bad stammer. Aaron often had to speak for Moses when he was in front of the pharaoh and could not articulate. |
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Vote: | Movie magic is movie magic and acting magic is acting magic. |
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Vote: | Now, I had feelings of unworthiness before I walked onto the set, and I have feelings of pride and wonder and astonishment and disbelief when I see what we managed to achieve on the screen. |
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Vote: | Of course, silence in the theater, when you know that that silence is being sustained before your eyes by a group of actors on stage can be equally thrilling. I think we undervalue silence as a very powerful currency. I think we're frightened of it right now. We fill it at the least provocation. |
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Vote: | Once I start painting, once I start acting and working, it's not a holiday. It's not a respite, but it is, in a sense, a balance, but it's of equal weight. It's a balance; it does balance out. |
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Vote: | One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer. |
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Vote: | People have been, as I said earlier, crushed and distorted and forced into all kinds of strange postures as human beings because of circumstance. I don't know what monsters and demons would be in me if I felt that violence was the only way out of a very dark corner. |
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Vote: | Quite often when I'm cast in a movie, I'm asked to bring whatever intelligence is there to the surface. |
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Vote: | Shock is shock. Your body goes into shock, regardless of it being real blood or fake blood. The mind sends powerful messages to all the various glands and secretions in the body. It's impossible trying to act it; it just happens. It's a very important question: no acting. |
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Vote: | Sometimes, you know, one is distracted by a bad print or a bad sound quality. |
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Vote: | Somewhere in your career, your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries. |
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Vote: | That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere. |
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Vote: | The astonishing silences in a Tarkovsky film... can sweep you into screen and... you don't want to end. |
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Vote: | The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head! |
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Vote: | The close up in any great film is also telling the audience exactly where that character is. So you see it's very cinematographic stuff. Shakespeare lends itself so beautifully to film. |
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Vote: | The Dostoevsky in Russia is very alive. |
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Vote: | The greatest irony is that I changed my name from Krishna Bhanji to Ben Kingsley in order to play Mahatma Gandhi. That is an extraordinary irony. However, that was my birth name because my grandparents on my father's side actually came from Gujurat. |
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Vote: | The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent. |
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Vote: | The integrity of the moment... it is going to be scrutinised as a piece of narrative drama for as long as that film or DVD or mechanical recording lasts... you are committing yourself, in those moments, the possibility of being heard by your great great great grandchildren. |
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Vote: | The many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed. |
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Vote: | The number of choices you make in the event that you see on stage, those choices are sometimes largely determined by the rehearsal process and the experiments that you go through and the choices that you make in the rehearsal room, not in front of an audience. |
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Vote: | The title is the equivalent of when you become a doctor after years of medical school training... I suppose after years of chewing up the furniture and scenery on stage and in films I get to Sir for being a thespian. |
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Vote: | The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that. |
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Vote: | There are other non-English, Asian, Mexican... many, many directors I'd love to work with of different nationalities because a different national temperament and a different rhythm and a different way of looking at things is enlightening to work with. |
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Vote: | There have not been any troughs as regards my work. There's never been a trough of my assurance. |
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Vote: | There is a lot of creative energy in me right now. In the work I'm now doing, I know that my soul-my soul-is fully articulate. |
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Vote: | There is so much to do on a film set. It is an extraordinarily invigorating and wonderful place to be, when things are running well. |
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Vote: | There was one titanic guiding light on the film set, and I was in the presence of a true Mahatma, in the deepest and most profound sense of the word. |
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Vote: | There's always a part of me that's migrating. That's so much part of my attempt to portray all these different men. The sense of being displaced from my home, homeland and language is a very real part of my working life. |
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Vote: | There's nothing worse than taking your children to a bad pantomime where they are having more fun on stage than the kids are in the audience. It's insulting, it's demeaning, it's excluding. |
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Vote: | There's probably a young director, male or female, out there somewhere, I don't even know their names, but maybe I'm destined to work with them, and we'll have an extraordinary relationship. I would love to work with Claire Denis because I think she's extraordinary. |
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Vote: | There's so much crap talked about acting. |
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Vote: | To be moved is beautiful. We don't go to the cinema to leave in exactly the same state that we were in when we walked in. We buy our ticket, we pay our seven or eight dollars to be moved. That's honestly what we pay for. |
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Vote: | To offer to our tribe, as storytellers, narratives which are absent of a dark side is a terrible disservice. I'm just fighting for the right for a film to be stirring and brilliant and illuminating. |
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Vote: | Unfortunately I went to a hotel in Krakow, and unfortunately, one night, there was a brawl in the bar because a horrible anti-Semitic remark was made to one of my fellow Israeli actors, one of my fellow actors who was an Israeli, sorry, and we were all extremely upset. I reacted rather violently, I'm afraid. |
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Vote: | We are adjusters. We empathize, we change rhythm and above all we listen to our fellow actors-if they're good actors. |
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Vote: | Well, it's wonderful to be identified strongly with my work. |
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Vote: | What we have in Shakespeare is a very, very early form of device which today in screenplay is the BCU-big close up. |
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Vote: | When Attenborough asked me to do Gandhi it was almost like stepping off one boat and stepping on to another, even though both boats are going at 60 miles per hour. |
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Vote: | When I choose a role it's either because I recognise the man, or that I'm very curious to know him. If I neither recognise nor know him, then it is better that I don't play him. |
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Vote: | When you drop your guard in films, the acting process compensates. You get lazy and you start acting. |
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Vote: | With narration, you have to be very accurate with your voice. It's a good exercise to do. |