Period Piece Quotes & Sayings

In terms of trying to improve as an actor, for me it's always important to return to the stage. After doing a piece of theater for a prolonged period, I can think I must have surely improved in some way as an actor - you must be fitter than you were prior to doing it. For me, theater is very, very important in keeping things fresh and dangerous. — Cillian Murphy

Any time you make a movie where you're living in a certain head space for an extended period of time, it's tough not to take a little piece home with you. — Chris Evans

[Henry] James is much more complex than Jane Austen. That's why it's not so easy to adapt him. People expect a nice period piece, but that's not always the case. There's a deep human mystery in his work. — Agnieszka Holland

I think the thing that would interest me would be to appear in a period piece where you'd get to dress in an elaborate costume and say nothing but just look fabulous and have a fancy role. — Ian Astbury

I've never done a period piece or a comedy, and that could be something truly different for me. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

I spent a little time in Germany as a schoolboy learning German, and it's a country I knew very well, spent a lot of time in. I knew the history very well. I've always wanted to do a piece of work about the post-war period, of one sort or another. — Stephen Daldry

I would love to do a period piece. That would be really cool. And also like to do something transformative and have to transform yourself physically to become that character. Any interesting, fun roles, I'm attracted to. — Tracy Spiridakos

I would love to make a 1830's period piece, a house in the country, a classic atmospheric haunted house movie, visually it would be so beautiful, the costumes, the candles, the darkness, and the quiet, no radio, to TV, the clock ticking away. — Conor McPherson

I've never done a period piece. That's something I'd be really interested in doing. — Janet Montgomery

All great music is contemporary. If it's still alive and kicking, then it's contemporary. If it fades away, it was a period piece. It had its moment, and that was it. — Steve Reich

I did a film called 'Victor' that I'm really proud of! It was a period piece and the true life story of Victor Torres. I play his mom, and it's a very moving film. — Lisa Vidal

A guitar is a piece of wood, and if this piece is resonating in a period of 40 or 60 years, it kind of gets to know what it is after awhile ... the reason violinists play violins that are hundreds of years old. The wood learns to sing. — Dave Genn

It was an honor to work with Samantha Morton on this Casablanca-esque, silent-film-esque, Americana photobooth Woolworth's hay day period piece of surrealism/ realism/ story time tell-tale-ism, black and white 35 mm film, washed in strange light, over this love hate tune, heartbreak song, life-goes-on lullaby, The Last Goodbye. It's a doorway into the future of the fatal past-tense. Get it? — Alison Mosshart

This is the same advice they give people who've just come out of rehab. After a grueling period of work (or what passes for grueling work in our soft-handed world) you will crave some kind of reward. Don't let this cause you to rush into a big decision, like a new house or a marriage or partial ownership of a minor league baseball team, that you may later regret. The interesting thing about this piece of advice is that no one ever takes it. — Tina Fey

I would love to do something in the thriller category. Not so much horror, but I would love to do a full-on psychological thriller. That would be really interesting. A period piece would also be fantastic. — Brooke Nevin

The danger in having modern music tied to a period piece is that hearing something may take you out of the moment. — Aldis Hodge

Yeah, it's terrible really. Little fucking minions in there hacking away with their teeny individual pick axes, tearing away the lining of my uterus piece by piece, basking in glory every time I let out a little cry of pain. — Laurel Ulen Curtis

When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound. — Edward Albee

I don't know concretely if it's due to superstition, but any time a new rule is implemented into the NBA or a new piece of equipment or a new technology, there is always a transition and adjustment period by players and coaches and anyone involved with the game. — Stu Jackson

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time. — Molly Antopol

When I saw 'Pretty In Pink' at the cinema at the age of 11, I just thought it was a period piece from maybe 100 years previously. I had no idea that was what everybody was supposed to be wearing. — Caitlin Moran

In a period piece, particularly a fantasy, the lighting is your own choice, the lenses are your own choice. It's really a great thing for a cinematographer to do. Everything is open for you. You can even be more creative and you can use more shadows than usual. — Vilmos Zsigmond

I'm not Russell Crowe. I'm not going to do a period piece. — Kevin Hart

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out. — Donna Tartt

It's hard to find actors that don't feel contemporary when you put them in a period piece. — George Clooney

I would have loved to do 'Alice in Wonderland.' Being a 'Bond' girl would always be fun. We had a lot of action in 'Eclipse' and I'd definitely like to continue down the action road. I want to do a romantic period piece, but those are really hard to get made because they're very expensive and there's not a huge demographic. — Ashley Greene

Some people are not meant to be a part of our lives forever. Some people visit our lives for a brief period, not to stay in it, but to show us something that we have been unable to see it ourselves. In the form of a gift, a lesson or a piece of wisdom, they change the course of our life and help us to fulfill our destiny. — Purba Chakraborty

I dream of working with iconic directors such as Tim Burton, Baz Luhrmann, Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson - so I'm setting my sights pretty high! My perfect role would be in a fairy-tale period piece, and I'm quite upset all the Harry Potter movies have been made as I'd love to have been in those. — Dree Hemingway

The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.) — Milan Kundera

There are so many things I'd like to do. I'd really like to be in a period piece that takes place in old New York or old Hollywood and wear those costumes and that makeup. — Jenny Slate

The subject of a piece of writing has not suffered the tension and anxiety endured by the subject of the "Eichmann experiment" (as it has been called) - on the contrary, he has been on a sort of narcissist's holiday during the period of interviews - but when the moment of peripeteia comes, he is confronted with the same mortifying spectacle of himself flunking a test of character he did not know he was taking. — Janet Malcolm

I worked on dramas before, I love sinking my teeth into something dramatic or a period piece, but there's something so fun about doing a comedy. When you go to set and your only job is to make people laugh, there's an unbelievable energy on set. — Skylar Astin

I've always wanted to do a period piece. — Kate Mara

I would like to do a period piece. I think that would be fun. — Beau Mirchoff

There are constant challenges in the drawing process, especially in a period piece, and therein lay the fun. — Nate Powell

At the end of the day, natural-gas peakers sit back there and get financed so that the Midwest corridor can have a huge [period] of four to five days of no wind. The peakers are running big time to make that up, because that is the swing piece that can always be turned on. — Bill Gates

There's always someone kicking guns. We wanted ["Badlands"] to be a world without guns and bullets, where martial arts was the form of fighting and defense and attack. Martial arts is king in this world. That was the first thing. We didn't want it to be a period piece either. We felt those are overdone and stuffy. That was what lead us to explore that area of science fiction and future, a world we can create and control. — Miles Millar

In the 90's action pictures were all the rage. As a woman, I was fed up with them and I initially thought that the script was just another action film dressed up as a period piece. — Madeleine Stowe

I don't see boundaries between styles, such as modern or contemporary. I've collected each piece from a different experience or period of my life. — Carlos Miele

I would love to do a period piece - in the 18th or 17th century. To me, it would be such an incredible challenge because of the way people carried themselves. There are so many incredible stories within those centuries - just the language and the way they carried themselves and what they were going through. — Amy Smart

I think doing period piece is easier, because after a certain distance, everybody is equal, I think. The relative contemporary is harder. I think that's the way it is. — Ang Lee

The essence of the evening was captured by a question from the audience. Someone asked: "What would it take to change your worldview?" My answer was simple: Any single piece of evidence. If we found a fossilized animal trying to swim between the layers of rock in the Grand Canyon, if we found a process by which a new huge fraction of a radioactive material's neutrons could become protons in some heretofore fantastically short period of time, if we found a way to create eleven species a day, if there were some way for starlight to get here without going the speed of light, that would force me and every other scientist to look at the world in a new way. However, no such contradictory evidence has ever been found - not any, not ever. — Bill Nye

Whatever is being investigated, created or produced now, in movies or TV, needs to consider the context in which it is being distributed. It's not a vacuum. There are certain universal themes of love, conflict, loyalty or family that are everlasting and that need to be presented in a way that makes it feel relevant, even if it's a period piece. You need to consider what context that film, that story and those characters are being seen in. — J.J. Abrams

A large part of how an actor works and their process is the stimulation of what's around you, and none more so than in a period piece. This is a modern piece, as much as it is set in a different time, age and myth. If it wasn't relevant, it wouldn't have been made and we wouldn't be putting our energy into it. It's relevant for us today because, in some ways, it throws up a mirror to all of us. As an actor, you get stimulus and you're effected by that, whether it's costumes or funny beards or castles. — Joseph Fiennes

I'm always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov. — Dagmara Dominczyk

I've always dreamed of doing a period piece, I just never knew what it would be. — Emmanuelle Chriqui

I wanted to do a period piece. I wanted to be on a show that people would actually watch, that was of quality. — Timothy Omundson

Of course, it's wonderful to film any period piece - but especially 'Foyle's War' because the art direction is so imaginative and yet at the same time so real. You can open a drawer on set, and even though the camera never sees what's inside, it'll be filled with genuine 1940s documents. — Honeysuckle Weeks

The first piece of art that I ever bought-when I could afford it-was a Warhol sketch from the period when he was just getting out of doing commercial work and more into art. It's a sketch of a young guy's face. I guess the gallery that I bought it from thought I would like it because the young guy kind of looked like James Dean. — James Franco

I'd like to play with a period piece. Playing a girl next door in 2010 is so different from playing one in 1950, the way you talk, walk, dress, relationships. It's really fun studying all that. — Emilie De Ravin

Make your introductions and you're welcome to wander off with any of the women watching you like you're the last piece of chocolate on the first day of their period. — Avery Flynn

The reason I could last for that long a period of being up was because the piece accidentally caught the excitement and adrenaline from, "Ooh this sounds different from usual ... Ooh I like that ... " That was the energy that kept me up. — Marnie Stern

Young man, the truth is what you create. — Richard Finney

Sometimes you have a period piece where you have to research around it but, if the writers have done their homework well enough, the information is all in the script. — Mads Mikkelsen

For a long period of time, the media covered rap music and hip hop the same way they cover a lot of black people, people of color, you know, the bad news happens to be news. They used to have these little stupid colloquialisms that pop up like, "You know what? No news is bad news!" They trick the masses into thinking that any news is great for you. And I just think that's a piece of crap. — Chuck D

It's interesting about classical music that the more you hear something, the more you get to know a piece, the better and better it gets, period, which is just an interesting thing on it. — Joshua Bell

Making this movie as a period piece about a period that was very recent in people's minds. I was in Taiwan [during the 1970s], so I hope I did all right. Otherwise, it could be the biggest embarrassment of my life. Also, the story is not linear, it's patchy, like a cubist painting, and there is always the possibility it will not hold together, it will fall apart. The tone is part satire, part serious drama, part tragedy, all mixed together, and it has to hit an emotional core. That's also very scary. — Ang Lee

The only reason I would stay away from a period piece is because sometimes the women are painted in a very stereotypical weakling, wallflower way - that's something I don't want to do. I want to show strength in the women I play, and a journey of some sort. — Dagmara Dominczyk

It's funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the '60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it's going to sound different every time, it feels more modern to me. — Jonny Greenwood

He asked me about headaches, nausea, vision problems, and when I had my last period. This is apparently the single most vital piece of information concerning a woman's body. You are asked this question repeatedly and by every person at every doctor's visit from the time you're twelve until you're given your last rites. "I'm sorry," says the priest, "but before I can absolve you of all sin and allow you to go to heaven, you must first tell me the date of your last menstrual period. — Kathleen Cosgrove