A Quote by James Caan
My acting technique is to look up at God just before the camera rolls and say, 'Give me a break.'
Related Quotes
There's an awful lot to be desired. I've gone to places where people say to me, "What's your technique?" Technique? What the hell technique is there to acting? We're acting because even with my voice I'm giving what I think is what I want to say.
I feel like God has moved me into a different way of doing things. I teach basic on-camera acting class called Acting 101...In my classroom, the students get every ounce of encouragement and craft and anything I'm able to give them.We have some rules. We don't take the name of The Lord in vain. We don't use foul language when we mess up on camera...There's a climate of safety...They feel very protected.
Just like my Uncle Charlie used to say, just before he sprung the trap: He said, "You can't cheat and honest man! Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump!
My style of working is I'll often be behind the camera, or right next to the camera yelling words at people, like, 'Say this, say this! Say it this way!' I'll straight-up give Anthony Hopkins a line reading. I don't care.
Before the days of video village a director should stand right next to the camera, look with his naked eye and if he sees something that is real to him, he'd look up at the [camera] operator and if he gives the look to indicate he'd seen it to, then you print and you'd move on.
It was extremely useful to grow up in front of the camera. It gives the camera no significance. I think it helped me have perspective on things. The attraction that Hollywood can have, I feel like I'm over that. Instead I just concentrate on acting.
I did this class when I first moved to California. It was a 'Kids on Camera' class up in the Bay Area. That was good for just getting me excited in acting and everything. Then once I started working down L.A., I just stuck to my acting coach, and she helps me prepare with auditions and that sort of thing.
'How the West was Won' was very hard, because it was a three cameras technique, meaning three cameras wide. Therefore I wasn't speaking to my fellow performer, I was speaking to a camera, or a line next to the camera. It was difficult to do, because its not real acting. I had to pretend that I was 'seeing' Agnes Moorhead or Jimmy Stewart or Carroll Baker. I wasn't, I was acting to a drawn line. It took me personally two years to make the film, because my character starts at age 16 and I end up being 92 years old in the film. By the end of that production, I was ready for a long nap.
That's the one thing that's funny about going from modeling to acting. In modeling, you're supposed to think about what you look like all the time. When you're in front of the camera, if you're not considering that, God knows what the pictures will look like. With acting, you have to completely forget it.
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.
A woman’s magazine quiz: Question: You decide to do the dread deed and just as things are starting to get hot he comes, rolls over, and asks, “Was it good for you?” You: a. Say, “God, yes! That was the best seventeen seconds of my life” b. Say, “Sure, as good as it gets for me with a man.” c. Put a Certs in your navel and say, “That’s for you, Mr. Bunnyman. You can have it on your way back up, after the job is finished
I've been acting since I was 2 and have always been on camera but doing a video is different because when you're acting, you pretend the camera's not there and you just do the scene and with a music video you're right in the camera so it feels weird sometimes.
The humble, simple souls, who are little enough to see the bigness of God in the littleness of a Babe, are therefore the only ones who will ever understand the reason of His visitation. He came to this poor earth of ours to carry on an exchange; to say to us, as only the Good God could say: 'you give me your humanity, and I will give you my Divinity; you give me your time, and I will give you My eternity; you give me your broken heart, and I will give you Love; you give me your nothingness, and I will give you My all.
Most people assume because I'm an actor that's all I know about and care about, I'm actually a camera geek and a film geek. I grew up making short films the same time I was acting. For me, it's a motion picture, not a play. I'm just as interested in what the camera department is doing and world building through costume design and production design as I am in acting. I think all good directors do that whether they're an actor or not.
The camera lens or the television camera is still just a proscenium arch. And as a great old character actor once said to me, wherever you're acting, you reach up and take hold of the proscenium arch, and you pull it down around your shoulders.
You can ask the people around me. I don't give up. I don't give up. I don't give - and it's not out of frustration and desperation that I say I don't give up. I don't give up because I don't give up. I don't believe in it.
Related Authors
Arnold Schwarzenegger Quotes
Austrian
Actor
Benedict Cumberbatch Quotes
English
Actor
Bruce Lee Quotes
American
Actor
Clint Eastwood Quotes
American
Actor
Daniel Radcliffe Quotes
British
Actor
Dwayne Johnson Quotes
American
Actor
Jeff Bridges Quotes
American
Actor
Johnny Depp Quotes
American
Actor
Kevin Hart Quotes
American
Actor
Kevin Spacey Quotes
American
Actor
Leonardo DiCaprio Quotes
American
Actor
Rob Lowe Quotes
American
Actor
Robert Pattinson Quotes
English
Actor
Sylvester Stallone Quotes
American
Actor
Will Rogers Quotes
American
Actor
Zach Braff Quotes
American
Actor