Annette Bening Quotes
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That's one of the most important things about acting is not just when you're speaking but when you're taking in from someone else. So I often go to the theater and I'm watching the person who's not talking. I love that.
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I like that I've been through things, that when something happens, it resonates with something that already happened. It's not that things like loss are more or less painful. But they're deeper. I find that fascinating.
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People always ask us women about how we balance our lives. Rarely do they ever ask men this but we are asked this and it makes a lot of sense - balance, right? It sounds right. And of course you do have to balance because otherwise you'd go crazy. And you do have to find ways of doing things in a sensible manner, raising children and all those choices. But then there's a part of creativity which is irrational and which is obsessive and then that's also part of what we do. So, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's part of what makes someone good.
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I can be very snobby about fiction, especially contemporary fiction. I can be kind of overly demanding, I think. But this is, I think, a good time. A lot of fiction comes out right now. So, I like reading the memoir. I love memoir, the biography, auto bio.
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Acting is not about being famous, it's about exploring the human soul.
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Right now, I love the fact that I have so many opportunities, but I know this privileged position cannot last. That doesn't mean that I'll stop working. I picture myself as an old actress doing cameos in films with people saying: "Isn't that that Bening woman?"
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It's always tricky to watch yourself, always. When I first had to watch myself, it was really hard because I'd done quite a few plays and I've never seen myself. So I was professional but I'd never watched myself. So I was like hearing you know... I'm sure you guys are all much more familiar with that because everybody has a phone, and everyone's taking pictures of themselves and making movies of themselves. And so people are more accustomed to it now. So I had to get used to it because there's a lot to be learned, of course, as an actor. When you watch yourself, you learn a lot.
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Movie is a near art form. It's showbiz and people want to make money. And generally people are financing things because they think it will make money whether it's a cable news show, a cable show, or a feature film, or whatever it is. So that's the part of it that drives it, I think, is really the dollar.
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One of the things on a very practical level as an actor or actress is that when you do a play, you do the entire story every time you do it. You have eight shows a week. You have a rehearsal process of four to five to six weeks. And then once you're in performance, everybody else goes away and you're there with your fellow actors and the audience and the material and your life becomes about that. And you go through the story from the beginning to the end every time you do it and depending on how long you do it, that's where the craft comes in.
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I'm just as intrigued by acting as ever. It's an ongoing process. There's no arrival. There's no point at which you say "Oh, OK, done it, got it." It just doesn't happen. And that's true of any creative endeavor. For me, it's just a lifelong interest. I'm very much interested in the craft. I started by doing plays and it took me a long time to feel comfortable doing movies, working with cameras. I felt like I was a theater actress pretending that I was a movie actress for quite a while. Now, I just love the process of working with cameras and being on a set and trying to put a film together.
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We're not all evil or all good, and we all make mistakes to one degree or another.
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One of the things that I love when I go to a film or when I'm reading some book or whatever, is to be told a secret I thought only I knew and then someone says, "Oh my gosh, you know, too." And film can take us into private moments in a way that the theater, I think, kind of can't, and that's one of the reasons I like doing films. And the way a book can is that these little secrets and the private things that go on in our minds that maybe we haven't shared with anyone, and then someone writes it or shows it to you in a film, you think, "Oh, that's me. Oh my God, that's me, I have that secret."
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Maybe that's one of the virtues of the 2016 election that we're going through is all of this racism and xenophobia and sexism and whatever else you want to say is being exposed, maybe that's a blessing. I'm trying to look at the positive side of what's been happening in our country, which is frightening.
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I had never met an actress or an actor when I thought that I might like to be one. I had never been around people in show business or from the theater or from movies or anything. And I say that as an encouragement, I don't know some people who want to be doing what I'm doing or be involved in film. You don't have to be from it to get interested and get involved. I certainly wasn't.
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Some people say talent is energy and that's a very interesting way of thinking about it. In other words, people with talent have a lot of energy.
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Modern acting is method acting, most of it. And there are sort of different schools, so I guess I'm not really from one school or another. I had a number of different teachers but they were all kind of drawing from the same pool, which is - What do you want? What are you doing to get what you want? And, what is in the way? These are basic acting questions. Knowing the answers to those questions. So you're talking about objectives and actions and obstacles. That's a sort of shorthand that gives you a language.
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And if there's anything movies can do in a way that I just love, and I love as an audience is, "Show me something I don't know about. Show me something I haven't seen."
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I've always been pretty levelheaded. In show business you need to have a certain internal stability.
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You can't ask the guy with the checkbook to always be the person. So, we actors have to try. And believe me, it's not just young people who are struggling with this, trying to get things of substance made because of the proliferation of technology that it's just harder and harder to get things that really matter made. But they are being done and you just have to fight the good fight and try to... if you have something that you have written, you have to do your best to try to get it made in whatever way you can.
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It used to be the one or the other, right? You were the 'bad girl' or the 'good girl' or the 'bad mother' or the 'good mother,' 'the horrible businesswoman who eschewed her children' or 'the earth mother who was happy to be at home baking pies,' all of that stuff that we sort of knew was a lie.
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I love watching people listen. And on film often some of the best moments if you think about favorite moments on film, often the person isn't even talking.
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You read something and you know it's not there yet. There's a little section here that... this part's good but that is a little not, it doesn't quite work. That doesn't quite work. That's easy. To say, "OK, now, this is what I think will fix it." That's harder. And most people can tell you what's wrong with something. Very few people can say what they would do to fix it.
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We still want to idealize moms, and sometimes we want to idealize actresses who are moms, too. I know that's something I've experienced, but we're all just doing the best we can and we're all trying to raise our kids and talk to them about everything that needs to be discussed.
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As an actor, you want to be open to the unexpected. So in order to be open to that, you do have to get out of your discursive mind just like in any creative process, this isn't just about acting. So you have to learn a little bit how to work with your own mind.
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I am really looking forward as I get older and older, to being less and less nice.
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I think what's interesting about the whole paparazzi thing is that unless you're Brad Pitt or Madonna, you can pretty much avoid it. You know when you're going to an opening that you will be photographed, so that's fine. And you know the restaurants that have paparazzi, so you don't go to them.
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If you're an actor, you have to find a way to make peace with all the media attention.
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Sometimes people don't rehearse at all, but you might have had a chance to rehearse for a few days, or even more than that. Then in the moment when the camera's running is the only time it matters. So whatever you've discussed or thought about or discussed with the director, the other actors, hopefully there's a part of the experience that you've left open so that only in that moment the camera catches it. That's of course the hardest thing to do because everything is planned and you have thought about it in advance.
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In a film, if you can capture what's going on underneath, you can begin to make a connection between the character and the people watching it.
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Things either become unclear in a story or they're just ambiguous with no real point. So defined gray area with clarity that also works in the narrative, that's tricky.
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