A Quote by Michael Caine

Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you.

Michael Caine

Quote Topics

About Acting Actor Assure Cinema Covering Easy Exposing Good Himself Looks Machinery Movie Playing Should Stage Stage Acting Think Very

Quote Author

Michael Caine
English - Actor
Born: March 14, 1933

Acting is something I appreciate, and I think it's been an amazing experience. But I'm not passionate about acting the way you probably should be to call yourself an actor.

Evangeline Lilly

The Devil is perfectly willing that the church should multiply its organizations and its deftly contrived machinery for the conquest of the world for Christ, if it will only give up praying...The Devil is not afraid of machinery; he is only afraid of God. And machinery without prayer is machinery without God.

R. A. Torrey

I don't have any theories about acting, and I don't think about how to do it, except that an actor shouldn't take himself too seriously, and shouldn't try to make acting something it isn't.

James Garner

For an actor to remain a child is rather important. It's a childlike, dreamy thing, acting, if you think about it. It's the sort of thing children fantasise about, playing cowboys and Indians in the street. I think that acting is just a highly refined development of that.

Michael Gambon

Denzel's all about the work. He's all about the acting. He's an actor. He'll tell you himself, 'I'm not a movie star, celebrity, something else. I'm an actor.' He steps on a set, that's what he is, and that's what he gives you. He gives his heart.

Antoine Fuqua

I know what a good question would be for an actor. What's your least favorite thing that you've ever heard an actor say about acting? Or about being in a movie?

Kathleen Hanna

My belief about performance capture is that it's a technology which allows actors to play extraordinary characters. But from an acting perspective, I've never drawn a distinction between playing a conventional, live action character and playing a role in a performance capture suit. And from a purely acting point-of-view, I don't believe there should be a special Oscar category because I think it sort of muddies the waters in a way.

Andy Serkis

We have so much access to one another through technology and everything else, that we're very much used to people being real. When folks go on TV and they're basically acting - if they were good actors they'd be acting and paid for it for a living, but they're not good actors. When we see bad acting, it doesn't look like bad acting, it looks weird, and we are turned off by it. I'm not talking about anybody in particular, that's just politics right now. This generation, I feel like, has incredible bullshit detectors.

Jason Kander

That's one of the real downfalls of celebrity. You're something that's about you at some point, and that gets latched onto and pumped into the machinery. Then you start having a million other people telling you who you are, and what you should be doing and why, and it's easy to lose your way.

Lindsey Buckingham

Cinema is empathy machinery, and we multiply our life experience through cinema. When it is good cinema, it almost counts as a personal experience.

Sebastian Lelio

Actors should be instinctive and spontaneous. If you think about acting, you're not going to be good.

Paul Morrissey

Good acting should be invisible. You shouldn't be aware of the acting. It should feel real.

Susanna White

People talk about the difference between radio acting, TV acting and stage acting, but I think it's all the same. For instance, when I played Vultan in 'Flash Gordon,' I put as much energy into it as I would with 'King Lear' - it's all part of the same thing.

Brian Blessed

It is only comparatively primitive machinery that affords a stimulus, and there is already a faint period touch about Pacific 231 and Le Pas d'Acier. One feels...that Prokofieff should have written ballets about the spinning jenny and the Luddite riots; that Honegger should have been there to celebrate the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the death of Huskisson with a "Symphonie Triomphale et Funèbre".

Constant Lambert

I really enjoyed being on movie sets, and I had fun with the people, but I didn't really think about acting or care, or I didn't think I cared about acting.