A Quote by Alan Ladd

I learned more about acting from George Stevens in a few months than I had in my entire life up until then. — © Alan Ladd
I learned more about acting from George Stevens in a few months than I had in my entire life up until then.
I learned more about acting from George Stevens in a few months than I had in my entire life up until then
Wallace Stevens had more time to write as an insurance agent. He was a bond lawyer and I know that insurance company lawyers don't have to do nearly as much as we had to do. We were out more in the production area. I'm not condemning Stevens for having had a better job than I did, but that's one of the many places where I differ from him.
I calculated the amount of time I spent with my father during my entire life... the total amount of time I had with him, if you add up the hours, was about two months. My father was a busy man... we had very few opportunities to really sit down and talk as father and son.
Technically, maybe I learned most of all from George Stevens, and among his movies I learned the most from 'A Place in the Sun.' It's a lesson in moviemaking.
They say a man doesn't know himself until he faces death for the first time. . . I don't know about that. It seems to me that the person you are when you're about to die isn't as important as the person you are during the rest of your life. Why should a few moments matter more than an entire lifetime?
Some directors, like Stevens [George Stevens], shoot full circle, 360 degrees, and that's what's right for them. I generally shoot at about a seven to one ratio. But part of that is because I've worked on every screenplay, so I'm further along in the visual concept.
When I made the decision to go to Europe, a lot of people questioned it. The first six months I was there even I was questioning it, but I think I learned a lot more about myself in that six months than I have my whole life.
I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.
What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I didn't really know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down. I was a very public failure.
And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.
When you're young, you get by on charm and good looks, not that I miss being charming or good-looking, but then you start to understand things about life, about the craft of acting. You approach it a different way. It's much more fun now than it was, because you take more chances and risks. I enjoy acting now more than when I was young.
Well first of all I was nine weeks pregnant at the time and no one knew it. So it was - it had a whole other meaning for me not just because I had to let the dress out, you know, every few days before the actual day. But, you know, because that was the, you know, more important than anything else that was going on in my life. But in terms of actually winning I think I had been nominated four or five times before then. And every one of my co-stars had won up until that point.
I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up. (Again I'm trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens. I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.
I had a wife and children. I was mostly working in painting and decorating and then taking the occasional acting job as they came along. At that stage in your life you have to think about your priorities. It looked like I was going to have to take the building more seriously and give up acting.
...but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago "something or other or die" had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.
I'm thinking of writing a children's story about a leaf on a tree who arrogantly insists he's a self-made, independent leaf. Then one day a fierce wind blows him off his branch and to the ground below. As his life slowly ebbs away, he looks up at the magnificent old tree that had been his home and realizes that he had never been on his own. His entire life he had been part of something bigger and more beautiful than anything he could have imagined. In a blinding flash, he awakens from the delusion of self. Then an arrogant, self-centered kid rakes him up and bags him.
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