Top 90 Quotes & Sayings by Ben Mendelsohn - Page 2

For me it's a compliment, playing baddie characters. I take it as a compliment.

I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.

I think difficult characters are very rewarding to do. They often have facets to them and this and that.

Fassbender is fearless; he's a fearless actor.

There are always dimensions, and the way they get expressed is through the writing and the actors and the director you get to work with on that day. But there are always dimensions, outside of really basic stuff for very young people where it needs to be very clear.

Let me give you a little Mendelsohn 101: I came up in television in the early- to mid- 1980s in Australia.

As an actor who has spent twenty years trying to crack America, the day I reached the 'Bloodline' set and found my name on a chair next to Sissy Spacek's was the happiest of my working life.

'Slow West' is a western, and it's sort of a twist on the genre stylistically, I think, from what I understand going in.

In Australia, even the darkest subject matter has a little pinch of humor. A little sweet to make the sour go down.

I've been a Ryan Reynolds fan since the first time I saw him.

I think Kyle Chandler is something of a national treasure.

I think there's a lot of mythos about what's required in acting.

I grew up loving the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns.

I think some of my favorite Australian films were shot by people that are not Australian. And I think when Dean Semler did 'Dances with Wolves,' for instance, that's a very different-looking Western than what you've seen much of before. It's very rich, color-wise. But we've got our own very proud thing going on.

The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.

One of my earlier films is 'Quigley Down Under.' That was early on in my career, and that was horsey.

'The Outlaw Josey Wales' is one I watched again and again and again in the early days of VHS.

It's good to surf whatever waves are going on right there as they're happening.

I have an intensive relationship with the thing that I'm working on, and I hope that comes through. It's better for me to not worry about the things I can't fix once they're done.

I think that story wins out over acting and that the thing as a whole is more important than the performances therein.

There are two things: 1) what things one does in the world, and 2) what family one has. There's the two really tangible things that can stay.

I'm very interested in the history of Christianity, and what I can say for sure is that the Catholics and the Jesuits and stuff were very big on teaching and on learning.

As soon as you start acting in an accent, you're sort of out of your comfort zone. Maybe people start getting used to accents after a long period of time. But as soon as you do that, it's not so much as capturing the sound of the way other people speak, it's being able to actually be and move around in the sound.

From my point of view, things don't have to change to get better. Things are fantastic.

Crewing and being on film sets is kind of like being in the carnival, with carnie folks.

Life is a lot sweeter, I think, than you can be aware of it at times.

If you ride like lightning, you're gonna crash like thunder.

People don't know who I am, and that's not a bad thing at all from my end.

There were the usual types of things that happen, in a production, like logistical bullshit, and this and that and the other. That's the sort of stuff that happened. But I never felt, in a creative sense, that we were ever veering into a place that I hadn't signed on for.

Acting is broad enough a church that you can pick your races, decide which way you want to go at different times.I think that the story and circumstance tends to dictate the most and then what you do with your own approach after that.