A Quote by Mia Wasikowska

I think dancing is contributed hugely to how I am as an actor, just a level of comfort in my body and in movement. Things can become strangely physically technical when you're acting, and often something that just feels so unnatural is actually what you need to do in a certain scene.
I started doing community theater when I was seven and I think the intent was just expression. When you're a musician, you can make music in your room, and when you're a writer, you can write. Acting is one of the tricky art forms where you need a certain amount of permission to be able to do it. You can talk to yourself in the mirror, but it's different than actually acting or doing a scene. You need an audience and you need someone else to do it with.
I grew up in an artistic family where everyone was doing something in one field of the arts or another. I was I think 12 years old when I did my first acting at the Actor's Studio and James Dean once said that the only reason to become and actor is because you have to. I think that you know from a young age if that is a certain rush that you're going to need to satisfy you and to make you feel fulfilled - and if you don't then you shouldn't do it. It's just too brutal of a business most of the time.
When I'm writing stuff, I need to watch the scene in my head, like a little movie, or else it just feels stupid. It just feels very written. There are things that actors do and faces they make and pauses they take and their rhythms. You need that.
Physically touring is tough on me, not that I am weakling. I lose weight. I can't always find the things I need to keep my strength up. It is very draining physically. It is taxing for my mind and body, but in a good way. It feels healthy in a way to purge things out of my system every night.
I feel like people who actually know how music works on a technical level need to explain it to the rest of us a little more often.
When I was dancing, whether it was the music or the story, the question was 'Why am I doing this piece, and why am I dancing?' It is exactly the same when you are acting. You have a very close relationship with your body movement. You have to find the physicality of your character.
I think it makes such a huge difference when the director has acting experience as well because it just means that he not only has a view of the film as a whole and the intentions of the scene in terms of the audience, he also has an actor's instinct of how to communicate something to us.
I actually like acting in things that I'm directing because I'm able to control the tone of how a scene may go and I know, very clearly, what I want from myself in that scene and what I need, as far as from a directorial standpoint.
I really think there's a difference between how men critics see things than how women tend to. And I don't want to make that - it's not a generality and I don't want to say that, but I just feel - I know I do the same thing. There are certain things that I just am not that interested in. Certain kinds of films - I just don't enter them.
When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
I'm still learning to be the best actor I can be, and I have a long way to go to get to the level I would like to be at. My focus is still 100% acting acting acting. Once I hit a point where I feel very comfortable as an actor - because you can never stop learning, I don't care how comfortable you get, you can never stop learning - but once I hit a point where I can get that comfort level of taking on the task of directing and having the confidence in myself to have people's respect when I give them direction, that's definitely something I want to do someday.
There's just a feeling you get from certain things you do in life that just kind of feel pure and independent of what's actually, physically, going on.
The only tool we have as artists is selectivity. If you're a painter, you select the color, the lines, how severe they should be. As an actor you develop how angry you should be. You select how angry you should be. You listen to the other actor and then you react. In film, sometimes the other actor isn't even there. You have to play the scene. What I do is I call on my experience on the stage. I play the scene and I hope that I reach a certain level of integrity because that's what I learned on the stage.
Kissing on screen is just, funny enough you're just acting so you're distracted by that more than anything. Or at least I am. I'm actually always coming away from those things going like, 'I wonder how I kissed just now.' Because I have no idea! I'm just thinking about what's happening.
Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, a lot of the roles that I am offered are of Muslim characters, maybe because I looked a certain way in 'Neerja.' But I am actually Parsi.
More than anything, acting was more like a confidence thing. I love words - I love English - but I don't have a hugely academic brain, so I enjoyed it because it was a bit of a respite. I don't think I really had a sense I would actually be a musician or an actor; I just wanted to be around that.
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