A Quote by Viggo Mortensen

I like the detail work of telling a story in small pieces, as is done in movie-making, and also the long leap of faith needed to see a theatre performance through each night. Both require focus and self-discipline.
My faith in Islam is not unlike my faith in the game of basketball: Both require immense determination, focus, passion and discipline.
I mean there’s a certain finality about a movie, when it’s done it’s done – that raised eyebrow in that moment will always be that raised eyebrow. Whereas a play only lives as a blueprint for a performance on any given night. There’s a reason you can eat popcorn and watch a movie and you can’t do that in the theatre. Theatre you have to lean in, you have to tune your ear to the stage and participateI respond to heat. And blood. And humanity. The cold experience is not for me. I’ve always enjoyed all the real people in a room together in the theatre.
What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline. Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.
In fiction the narrator is a performance of voice, and it can be any style of voice, but I'm interested in the ways that a voice that knows it's telling a story is actually telling a different story than it intends to. In the way that I can sit here and tell you what I had for breakfast, but I'm really telling you that I'm having an affair, something like that. And I don't think my writing is plain, but I think a lot of my characters are just talking. There is vulnerability there, in that we can start to see through them, we can start to see where they're deceiving themselves.
The theatre always felt like home, and it does to this day. When I do screen acting, I miss telling a story from beginning to end, as you do nightly on stage. I love that relationship with the audience and how it changes each night.
The set of '12 Years a Slave' was an extremely joyous one! We all recognized that we were making a powerful, necessary and beautiful film, and we weren't about doing it without that sense of responsibility, and we recognized that we needed each other to tell this story. We also knew we needed to hold each other up as we told the story.
I don't see a future for Broadway-style theatre in India. We already have Hindi cinema, but small, intimate theatre will survive as long as people feel the need to talk to each other.
My films are about faith, and they're made on faith. There has to be faith because making a movie, so many things can go wrong. Me and my crew take the leap together, trusting the net will appear. I've been fortunate even though I've worked with small budgets, people have donated time and talent because they feel the films have something important to say.
Work hard. Through determination and self-focus and discipline, you can accomplish anything.
If you can imagine the story of the world as a giant movie, to not have some understanding of the Bible - its story, its history, and its impact - would be like watching a great movie and removing part of the plot. It can't be done. The real truth is that everyone regardless of faith tradition benefits from knowing and understanding these aspects of the Bible. It enhances one's knowledge of literature, science, art etc. It's difficult to read any classic work of literature for instance and not see biblical allusions.
Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre. It's a completely different discipline, it exists on its own. I would say that the beauty of it is it's not the theatre, it's not done over again. It's done in bits and pieces. Things are happening which you can't get again. I forbid anyone to say "Cut", the soundman, the operator, or whatever.
Both my parents have done considerable work in theatre and I have grown up with that culture, but I still felt that I needed formal training.
I mean they [ Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis] are both just really good guys and also they're both extremely funny in very unique ways. We made each other laugh an awful lot, and that goes a long way. And we also went through some hard times. I mean it was hard to make this movie [The Hangover].
I haven't done as many films as I would have liked. A lot of my contemporaries have done more. I don't have 'I will be a movie star' emblazoned on anything, but I'd like do a bit more screen stuff and then when the time is right come back to theatre. When it is good, theatre takes a lot of beating both to watch and perform.
Herzog and Malick both have this very unique naturalist intentionality to their process. It's about creating the mood, creating the focus and having discipline, but not prescribing what the performance was supposed to be. Neither of them are really directing their actors into a performance.
What strikes me is that 'XIII' looks like a movie. The shot making is movie-like, which is kind of fun - the kind of playful action movie shot making is pretty, is pretty good. What's also great about this game is its style and interesting story-line.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!