A Quote by Sydney Pollack
When you rehearse a play, you spend four weeks with one goal in mind - to wean the actor away from you. You want the actor to become completely independent and to understand all the emotional and psychological moves within the character.
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Having been an actor, I always want to leave room for the actors to find their comfort zone, so I don't like to be too rigid in how I plan my shots. It's different if you have weeks to rehearse and you can rehearse on your sets or in your locations and you can plan that out with your actors, but in modern independent filmmaking, you don't really have that time. You have to have a certain level of improvisation.
Whether or not I am a 'character actor' or any other kind of actor, I really don't know. When people call me a 'character actor,' I fail to understand what it means.
When you're making an independent film, it's like this actor plus this actor equals this funding, this financing. Pull this actor out, this actor is still here but this money's gone. It's this frightening puzzle mosaic that is the world of independent film.
I am an actor and I do not have to relate to whatever I play on screen them at a personal level. What is important is to understand the character, do enough homework to know the frame of mind of the character or his back story.
I didn't really look like a character actor, yet those were the roles I loved to play. If you were a character actor who didn't necessarily look like a character actor, you had to play bad guys.
Having children has helped me become a better actor because they remind you to play make believe. It's the ease and naturalness of their beings. They just play and it's completely real for them at the time. As an actor, if we do it well, we make you believe.
I didn't become an actor to make money. And I didn't become an actor to be famous - though people always gasp if you say that, as if it's unfathomable that an actor doesn't want to be a star.
Every director is always directing around the play. If you have an actor who really doesn't get the character well enough, you have to direct the play around that character. You have to make choices with that actor. If you have an actor that really doesn't get the role and has certain visions of the role, sometimes you have to direct around that actor.
When an actor comes to you and starts working with the script, the image of his character that you had in your mind gets substituted with an image of that particular actor. And this is the right way to go. An actor has to be absolutely truthful - this is the only thing required of him, apart from talent of course. It's very easy to understand: you need to absolutely believe in what you see.
I don't want to be quoted as 'Tom Hiddleston, psychologist says...' But there is a psychological aspect to being an actor. We are particular students of human nature - not every actor is, of course, but that's what fascinates me about being an actor.
I think theatre is by far the most rewarding experience for an actor. You get 4 weeks to rehearse your character and then at 7:30 pm you start acting and nobody stops you, acting with your entire soul.
I certainly don't like to play a bad guy. There are no bad people. It's only shades of grey. Also, I am not a great actor who can transform completely into a totally different character for a movie. I am not a trained actor.
An actor is here to perform. For example, if a character is a Punjabi or a Bihari, and the actor is not, doesn't mean we have to cast an actor from that region. If an actor can perform, they can portray anyone because an actor is here to try different roles.
I don't want to become a star. I never wished to become an actor, even when I am here. When you decide to become an actor, you've to choose why you're doing it. Are you doing it to become an actor or because you want to be famous? I am doing it because I love being in front of the camera.
To be an actor and a director, I actually felt it helped me tremendously to be in the scenes of The Hollars, because as you can see, they're very intimate, very intense scenes. You don't want to break the actor's character and you don't want to break their momentum, so as the actor, I tried not to call cut as much as I could, and almost make it feel like a play, just set this environment where these amazing actors could do what they wanted to do.
Sometimes perception is almost more important than the skill level of an actor. And if you give too much away, you have nothing to take for yourself and put onscreen. If people feel like they know you too well, they won't be able to indentify with the character you're trying to portray. Or they'll feel that you're just playing yourself, and then you just become a personality actor. And that's the death of any actor.
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