Film Acting Quotes & Sayings

I definitely want to go on acting for as long as I can find employment. I'm never happier than when I'm on a film set. I just want to keep working. — Daniel Radcliffe

Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don't train - at all really - for film acting. It's mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage. — Adam Driver

Everyone has the opportunity to do a horror film. There's something great about it as an actor. You have to go to places you'd normally never go and be put in situations you would never be put into. You don't get the opportunity in a lot of films to have this kind of acting. It's an interesting challenge. — Alexandra Daddario

I have no interest whatsoever in pursuing acting or becoming a mogul. I love writing and directing; I see those two jobs as the most critical in the making of a film. — James Gray

I didn't go to film school, I went to acting school. — Charles S. Dutton

It's hard with ballet because your aesthetic really is important. It's different from acting and from film. Nobody wants to watch somebody who is sickly thin. And it's interesting because I have danced with people who are ill, have eating disorders, and a light goes off within them. — Amanda Schull

At the end of the day, I want to be a teacher at a university, teaching film or acting. — Omar Dorsey

I've actually done three pilots for Disney. I met with the network when I was 16 years old and had just started acting. I would fly to Los Angeles to film pilots, then fly back to Dallas, where I grew up. — Spencer Boldman

I don't have any plans to pursue film acting. It's not my thing anymore, if it ever was. Yes, I do still act sometimes. But when I do, it's with people I know and trust, people who respect me as a person and appreciate what I have to offer. — Mara Wilson

It was always my intention to direct. I went to film school. And then I wanted to know how to work with actors, so I went to acting school. And then by the end of that, I caught the bug. — Benn Northover

Right before I got 'Sons of Anarchy,' I actually quit acting for 18 months and didn't read a single script, and I wrote a film. I felt like I needed to do something that I had control over, as an artist, and also just do something where I felt like I had some control over my life, as just a human, out in the world. — Charlie Hunnam

If I do a film and have to get naked, that tends to dictate how often I go to the gym. Acting in 'Richard II' on stage was a huge physical workout, so I ended up more toned than I normally am. — Eddie Redmayne

When I'm acting, I just want to be the character and not have to think of any film technicalities. — Denzel Whitaker

In the theater, you're so much more in charge as an actor. For better or for worse, you know what the audience is seeing. But you can be acting your socks off on film, and then you see the movie, and the camera is on the other actor, or they've cut out the lines you thought were significant, or they've adjusted the plot. So much of it is out of your control. — Susan Sarandon

I like acting in London-not least because it means I can go home after the show every day, rather than being on location making a film. — Saffron Burrows

To that extent that you can sustain and maintain that childlike part of your personality is probably the best part of acting.
Quoted in "Paul Newman's Road To Glory", interview with Paul Fischer, Film Monthly (2002-07-01) — Paul Newman

In a funny way, acting, to me, is all make-believe, even if the film has unicorns in it or is a normal movie that can be set in real-life time. I'm still imagining that I'm a different character, so it's all, in a funny way, like fantasy. — Elle Fanning

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

Seeing a film at the cinema, or a DVD or whatever at home, your brain is really receptive to not only whether the script's working, or if the actors are acting well, but also the colours. — Crispian Mills

Acting just happens to be my skill, but I think I would probably be just as happy being a technician or entering into the film business in some other way. — Jodie Foster

Making a film or doing a play are completely different experiences and entirely fulfilling, but completely unique. I also think one complements the other. People often say that theater is about flexing your muscles, and is actually real acting, whereas I sort of disagree. — Eddie Redmayne

I think I have always tried to do the smaller films. I like to jump around and there is something really nice for acting in a smaller film. But I think now, Hollywood's movies certainly involve a younger generation for the most part and so ... I love going back and forth. — Sigourney Weaver

A few nights ago I went to a Hollywood screening of a small independent film made by Sally Kirkland, an old friend of mine who also did terrific job acting in it. There were other actors in it and they were all terrific. — Nick Mancuso

In terms of acting, we go through phases of being really inspired by film and television and actors and works that we've read. — Laura Vandervoort

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

My tutor was a film director on the side, and she introduced me to film. She then put me in one of her short films, and it came out of that. That's when I fell in love with the process of making a film. After that, I was about 15 and I was like, "This is what I've gotta do." So, I started taking acting lessons, and then I applied to college to do acting. I got an agent, and it all just happened. — Eve Hewson

I wanted to stay in New York to pursue acting, but my dad urged me to get a four-year degree. Reading about the film school at Florida State University, he suggested I go there. I received my bachelor's degree in 2003. — Lauren Miller

Acting is what I love to do.I understand the differences between the different formats. But I enjoy whether it be film, TV or in the theater. — Carter Jenkins

When I got into the film business, my aim was to adopt a positive persona, of a guy who fights against injustice. And it saved me, because my acting was atrocious to say the least! — Chuck Norris

I love the art of acting, and I love film, because you always have anther chance if you want it. You know, if we - if this isn't going well, you can't say - well, you could say - let's stop. Let's start over again, Gene, because you were too nervous. — Gene Wilder

I did a film once that I was killed in. It was a painful, horrifying day. It was a wonderful day from the standpoint of acting, but I was a wreck otherwise. — Leslie Easterbrook

I love film, and I would love to be a part of something that people universally love as a piece of film. Sure. Of course I would. And I would love to take acting lessons, and see that side of it someday. But I'm a musician. — Norah Jones

If I don't do this film. I'll be acting in corsets for the next 20 years. — Keira Knightley

I never lost my interest in acting but I did lose my interest in the business and what I had to go through to make a film. I felt saturated, you know, like a sponge when it's saturated - it's not good. — Debra Winger

Relax, Xander. It's only two lines."
He closed his eyes and leaned into her, his arms wrapping her back. "But it's still lines in a real film, and if I mess it up-"
"They'll have you do it again. And again... and again." Liv laughed. "No big deal. Life is full of second chances. — Danika Stone

There is a film called 'A Separation.' If you see it playing, go see it. It's beautiful. It's so well written and the acting is amazing. It's one of those films that you would love to be a part of. — Demian Bichir

The whole idea with acting is that you take some risks. And if you take some risks, you're really going to mess up sometimes. But it's not OK to mess up a movie; it's not OK to do that just so you can improve as an actor. But film-making takes a little bit of risk in every department. — Domhnall Gleeson

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

My goal has always been not to look forward to the next thing, but to relish and celebrate the successes I have at the moment. Whether it's landing a part in a student film or having a good day in acting class, I never discredit anything. — Dianna Agron

Television and film acting is really fun because you are working with other people and you are not completely responsible for the outcome of the project. — Alex Borstein

I did theatre a lot when I was a kid. Then I went to acting school in New York. I did a lot of behind the scenes in college. I wanted to learn while I had the time. I studied theatre and film in different capacities. — Justin Bartha

Television is face acting, and film is eye acting. — Dominic Monaghan

I've never cared for the idea of a career path, or where a film might 'take me.' My love is for acting not money, so I only take on roles that I find challenging, in stories I find interesting. — Gael Garcia Bernal

I never feel more alive than when I'm on stage. On film you feel chopped up, you can be acting from the neck up, or the hand, there is a lot of close up. — Kathleen Turner

Absolutely, 'Rabbit Hole' gave me a nice first introduction into film acting. — Miles Teller

I started missing acting when I was in school, and I realized after being in the business after however many years that I was really interested in film. — Gaby Hoffmann

I got into acting to get my foot in the door for film-making. — Logan Lerman

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

I have been directing and involved in producing and the creating of films for quite a while as well as acting. I always think in terms of what the director needs, and not just for this scene but for the film. — George Clooney

I always tell younger filmmakers, it's not just about the acting or the art itself. It's about how big of an audience watches your film. — Donnie Yen

A lot of people don't realize, when you are acting in a martial arts film, you're not just performing martial arts. You're not just performing martial arts. You're actually acting as much as any other actor. — Donnie Yen

The toughest part of acting is never a single thing. It's more like a whole character. I find film really difficult - trying to make it feel like a consistent character when you're filming everything out of order. — Carey Mulligan

My first love is acting on stage. A sitcom is a hybrid of stage and film. — Judd Nelson

I think there were some dubious feelings about it, that the first 'Scarface' would not be surpassed by the second 'Scarface.' We were wrong; it surpassed it. The acting talent, the cinematography - we were propelled into a real class action film. Long after I kick the bucket, it'll be played. — Robert Loggia

This isn't to play down people who pursue acting ... For me, I do acting just as a fun job. It is a phenomenal job, and I have fun doing it, but I relate more to my martial arts, to my baseball, to my film study. There are more facets to my life that I relate to. — Ryan Potter

While making Genevieve, I learned there could be a lot more to a film than just acting in it. — Dinah Sheridan

I was just a cheap little starlet hardly acting at all in a very mediocre film. — Brigitte Bardot

I think that in France, we really admire American films, we admire their drive, we admire the modernity and ellipsism in the film and the writing and the style of acting, and we look at them perhaps in a way to see what we can steal from them, too, to make our own films more modern. — Francois Cluzet

We can see the film stars of yesterday in yesterday's films, hear the voices of poest and singers on a record, keep the plays of dead dramatists upon our bookshelves, but the actor who holds his audience captive for one brief moment upon a lighted stage vanishes forever when the curtain falls. — Daphne Du Maurier

I attend film school, my background is acting and directing. But the acting does best, I like to work on the stage. — Tommy Wiseau

It's all about hustling, whether it's in Boston or the film industry. I've been hustling my entire life - acting my way into trouble and acting my way back out again. I'm just fortunate to have had the opportunity to apply it in a different direction. — Mark Wahlberg

In England, when we're at drama school, we spend a lot of time learning the craft from playwrights and stage actors, who are very well trained in the basics of acting because they need to get it right the first time - you can't have second or third takes when you're in front of a live audience, unlike in film. — Sam Claflin

Acting in TV as opposed to films is really difficult. What a film gets two months to do, we get eight days to do. — Michelle Borth

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

I never took an acting class, so I've made all my mistakes on film. — Heath Ledger

There's no truth in acting, it's all a trick, because you go on stage in front of sets, you're on film - it's all a trick. I'm making it sound very - I really am demystifying it, but what I try to do, what I do, and I hope effectively, is to create a reality as if it is happening now, that you're fishing for words out of the air. — Anthony Hopkins

The only reason why you should do a film is because it creatively carbonates you and gets you going. If you're doing it for any other reason, you've lost sight of why you're acting in the first place. — Graham Phillips

In acting, you get to explore such an artistic side with different characters to research and learn and explore different things inside yourself and I do that anyway, so I might as well be doing something that I already do, as in a second nature to me, on film. — Gina Carano

I'm only thirteen, so I have role-models! But I've sort of experienced ... my sister has always been my role-model because I've always seen her. She's been acting my whole life and she's grown up on film, so it's neat for me to get to travel around and do interviews, because I've always seen her doing it. — Elle Fanning

I did a film called 'Floating' early on that had a scene which was similar to a real-life situation I was in at the time. It involved me having a conversation with my father, who was dying. It was close to home and it made me realise acting wasn't just making faces for the cameras, it was a real art form. — Norman Reedus

I decided to give acting a serious, committed try, and soon after, I read the script for 'Lovely and Amazing.' The story was beautiful and honest, and the characters struggled with the same insecurities many women - including me - face. I didn't think I had a chance in hell of being in the film, but I knew I had to go for it. — Emily Mortimer

My role as Ewan McGregor's girlfriend in the film 'Incendiary' ended up on the cutting-room floor, but at least I had two brilliant days of acting with Ewan. — Natalie Dormer

One of the things I tried to do is to kind of talk my actors through the scene, but at the same time let them know how I plan to shoot the film and just give them an insight into the way I'm thinking, so that when they're acting out their scene, they can kind of see it in their minds' eyes. — James Wan

My mum thought my TV and film addiction was laziness. If you're an immigrant, you know you'll never be an accepted part of society, but you hope your children will be, and you try to make them essential to the community in a practical way - being a doctor or a lawyer. Acting was beyond their comprehension. — Sanjeev Bhaskar

'Angus' was my first real film, but I had been acting for about 3 threes before that as well. — Chris Owen

So when my film career took off, I always felt like I was trying to play catch-up because I hadn't studied acting before. I didn't know how to manage money or my career. When I look back, I think I was a little bit shell-shocked. — Lea Thompson

Every film by Will Smith, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Don Cheadle will have great acting and carry good messages in the film. The films starring those actors are the films I tell young people to watch for good acting and to view for quality movies. — Brian J. White

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

Out of perverseness, I jumped on the subway and went down to a sound stage on Fourth Street to watch the shooting of Kay Doubleday's big strip scene in Mad Dog Coll, a gangster film that can still, to my embarrassment, be seen occasionally on late-night TV... Kay Doubleday was in my class at Lee Strasberg's; it was in the interest of art, I told myself, to watch her prance down a ramp, singing and stripping her heart out. — Brooke Hayward

Acting for me, is a passion, but it's also a job, and I've always approached it as such. I have a certain manual-laborist view of acting. There's no shame in taking a film because you need some money. — James Spader

[Constance Bennett] never tired of acting, said Peter Plant. She liked it, she enjoyed it, and she worked very hard at it. When she was making a film, she would really be busy preparing for the next day's scenes. I would visit her for half an hour, and then she would go back to her script. She had what her father had, a photographic memory. Richard Bennett, I understand, could read a play through once, and he knew the whole play, and everyone else's cues. I have the good fortune to have inherited that, and it's made many people think me more intelligent than I am. — Eve Golden

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

I think they're having trouble adjusting to the emotions they have outside of their dreams. At any rate, they keep acting like demented teenagers from a porno version of a John Hughes film. (Asmodeus) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

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

I went to film school at Columbia and did that for a couple years, and really thought I was going to be a filmmaker, and then I kind of drifted over to the acting side after that. — Scott Adsit

My first film, 'Like Minds,' was with Toni Colette, who was extraordinary. I mean it was basically a mini-masterclass for acting on film at a time when all you could probably see were my eyebrows bouncing up and down on screen. — Eddie Redmayne

Whether it's acting, directing or writing, I want to be involved in the film industry for the rest of my life. — Tom Felton

When you do bigger jobs there's more attention and when you film in New York you get loads of paparazzi everywhere. It affects your work because you're trying to think about the person you're acting with and you've got 20 other lenses taking pictures of you at the same time, and it throws you. — Carey Mulligan

The big difference with Juliette and the others in that film is that she goes beyond acting. — Olivier Martinez

I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting. — Jim Jarmusch

I had acting teachers, and one of the things that was encouraged was to keep it fresh, to be spontaneous. That's the magic of film often. — Matt Dillon

With film acting, and often when the camera comes very close, you just have to think about something and the camera will pick it up. — Ruth Wilson

It's much harder to act in a bad film than in a good one. A terrible script makes for very difficult acting. You can win an Academy Award for some of the easiest acting in your career, made possible by a brilliant script. — Michael Caine

I was just doing bits and pieces of acting in the U.K. I'd been in the film 'Breaking and Entering' - Anthony Minghella gave me my start and I miss him dearly. Then I made the trip out to L.A., during one of their pilot seasons, which was when they were developing 'Gossip Girl,' and I auditioned, and things came together. — Ed Westwick

I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart and soul. — Conrad Veidt

I like fashion, but I love, love, love music and film; they are my two passions. I would love to pursue my acting and my love of music more than anything. — Cara Delevingne

I've had a lazy career. Sometimes one film a year, sometimes none. I'm walking around in the street and doing this other thing, living, that I'm much more interested in. I just do some acting on the side. — James Spader

When I connect to my soul, project it into another # character , and then bring it to the stage or to a film
that has always been for me the great joy of # acting . It's been as if my soul kind of leaps out of my body and is able to be free and dance around. — Kyra Sedgwick

I find that as long as I'm acting it doesn't matter if it's for TV, or a series or a short film. I always have fun no matter what I'm doing. — Jodelle Ferland

I think loads of people see acting, when they're kids, as these magical stories that just happen within the context of the film or the play or the cartoon or whatever they're seeing. They don't imagine that there are actually people that go and do that for a living. — Rebecca Hall