John Hurt Quotes
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I'm very director oriented.
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I think I'd rather do [acting] in the real place. It requires different things, working with green screen, but its an imaginative exercise anyway, the whole business of acting, so it just gives you a bit more to feed the imagination. Unless it's really silly, just two of you stuck in a space with nothing but green screen that's got to be pretty difficult.
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There is always a better choice that you were unable to quite touch with a single stroke. Even in acting, there comes a point, like a painting, where you have to say, "That's it. I can't go any further with it." And sometimes, you say, "I'm really pleased that that's where it's finished up." Other times, you think, "I don't think I really quite got there, but I haven't got time to go any further." Rather reluctantly, you have to say "That's it."
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I've never known what I've wanted to do. I've never planned anything in my life.
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Developing characters is a collective process, on one hand; it's an individual process on the other. The truth is rarely pure and never simple, as dear Oscar Wilde would say. A great of it, of course, is, you collect as much information as you can and then you put it into the mulberry of your mind and hope that you come up with a decent wine. Sometimes you do; sometimes you don't.
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The truth is rarely true and never simple.
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I think an actor is very like a sportsman. You have periods where you're in terrific form. Everything you touch seems to work, and come right. And other times, when you're working really hard, it's okay, but it isn't scintillating.
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Lotte Lenya was all emotion. She wasn't anything but emotion. She was not an intellectual.
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I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.
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It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.
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I've never done a [Berthold] Brecht. In the 1960s when the Berliner Ensemble came over [to England] with Helene Weigel [Brecht's second wife], I saw all the Berlin actors. It was an amazing time, very exciting early 1960s.
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This whole theory of alienation that intellectuals have been passing on, really is just to stop a lot of ham acting. If you fill something with a proper emotion, it didn't worry him at all.
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With [Fred] Zinnemann I did A Man For All Seasons. He was my screen godfather. I'm happy to say he was.
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Be true to what you want to say, or whatever style it is that you've chosen or genre you've chosen. Do it well! My criteria always has been that the piece must stand the chance of succeeding on the level it's intended to succeed on.
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I certainly don't see myself as Caligula.
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I think [ Lars Von Trier] is a fantastic filmmaker. No question. You've got to be ready for him. He's sharp and he's got a sharp tongue and I love that. He doesn't mind it back.
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Film has changed vastly in the time that I've been an actor, and it's, I think, very much for the better. I think there are just magnificent films now, and they're blossoming in the way that the novel did years ago.
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Bong Joon-ho is enormously sensitive to performance. He knows what he needs to see and that's all he needs to shoot. He is so daring. We don't do that in the west. We shoot everything.
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Elephant Man [movie] was much more difficult physically. This had a couple of days. It was quite tricky. I had my leg strapped up behind me and I am a little older now. It was all marvelous, though. He [Bong Joon-ho] is one of the most fabulous directors in the world.
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I'm besotted by [Kirsten Dunst] now. I think she's just wonderful. I can't think for a second that however much she'd worked in America, she would never have had the chance to play [a role in Lars Von Trier's 'Melancholia' ] like that. You have to get outside of the States to do something like that.
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Acting is an imaginative leap, really. And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able - I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.
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I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit.
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I think one of the things that is important, for me, though a lot of people would disagree with me, is that you be founded in theater so that you understand what an audience is, what kind of an animal it is and how to play with it. How to have fun with it, how to sympathize with it, all the things that an audience is. I don't think you're going to find that out unless you do theater.
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We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.
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You carry that through and adapt it to a camera lens, but you're quite right, you cannot be sure of what an audience is going to do. You don't know what's going to happen to the piece you're doing anyway. You don't know how it's going to be edited. There are a lot more unknowns in cinema. But that you have to readily accept. That's when, I think, you have to forget about intellect, to a degree. Intuition is very important when you're working with a lens, I believe, for what the lens is doing, too.
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I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.
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Often I don't read novels. The script is more important, that's the springboard to your imagination, really. Peripheral information can be interesting to read but you can't use it when it's not in the script.
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I'm not accustomed to doing films without seeing the script. There are certain people that are auteurs, and you accept them regardless of whether you see a script or not. But Spielberg is not an auteur.
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You have to learn to cut your cloth accordingly. But it seems to be a human weakness. Once you start making a lot of money, you just join in with everyone else. It's like the banks, and we've seen what happens there.
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The first film is everything you want to say and how you want to say it. Lots of directors will do that and do it really well, but the second film is not so easy.
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