Top 13 Stanislavski Quotes & Sayings

I played Lucky in Waiting for Godot at Yale and it was a thing that Stanislavski talks about: he says you don't need his 'method' if you can count on your inspiration and it was a moment of inspiration that came to me, not in rehearsal but on stage. It hit me right there in the middle of the play and it was great - it travelled into immediate communication.

I studied technique for ten years, from age 7 to 17. I guess you could say I went more on the Stanislavski side than the Meisner side - there's always that wide divide among actors when it comes to technique.

My advice to any actor who's playing, quote, unquote, "extra" to think of it more like Stanislavski did. It's not a small part. You are the lead in the movie, in your own movie.

Accents influence a performance. If you look at Stanislavski, he says work from the in to the out, and I probably overall work the other way. I find an accent and a mood, and that influences the character massively.

I do the best I can - I know my way around [Russian method acting pioneer] Stanislavski, but I can't take myself seriously like that. I respect people who do it, of course. I just think I'm lucky to still be working at 73. You reach a point in life where you just think, "Show up, do your job, make sure the cheque's on the way," and that's it. I'm not hungry to do anything more, really.

I wouldn't call myself a method actor, but I have my own method. I do my own research. I come up with a background for the character. I'm not a club man. I don't like isms. I've never really studied Stanislavski.

The "magic if" is a tool invented by Stanislavski, the father of acting craft, is to help an actor make appropriate choices. Essentially, the "magic if" refers to the answer to the question, "What would I do if I were this character in this situation?" Note that the question is not "What would I do if I were in this situation?" What you would do may be very different from what the character would do. Your job, based on your analysis of the script, the scene, and the given circumstances regarding the who of your character, is to decide what he or she would do.

All of modern acting comes from Stanislavski, who was the Russian partner to Chekhov. When Chekhov was writing his plays, Stanislavski was running his theater. And Stanislavski really was the first inventor of modern acting and then everything that came out of the method and Stella Adler and the great teachers really came out of him.

Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.

My mentor Jon Simmons introduced me to the Stanislavski system, which is so heavy on back-story. So you write and write and write these back stories about a character and then you throw it away. So then on set, if it doesn't come, then you didn't do your work.

It was only when I went to acting school that I was like, "You are absolutely such a pigheaded freak show that you thought you, at the age of 12 or 13, could have a better understanding of Stanislavski. Why did you think that you didn't need to go to school?" It was quite funny. But, I was certainly inspired.

Some people have heard of The Method, which originally goes back to Stanislavski... he gave you six major pointers whereby you became that character and tried to fool your mind psychologically. That's it in a nutshell. Daniel Day Lewis is an example of somebody like that who stays in character between takes.

At drama school I learned the Stanislavski technique, which uses sentimental memories and bits of your past to put real emotion into the scene.