Mike Leigh Actors Quotations

Some deeply untrusting actors - the kind that need to know exactly what's what and are completely insecure - might be quite good within the parameters of a certain sort of acting.

The reason my films work is because every actor on set is very secure. They're able to fly.

The kind of acting that's wholly literary or cerebral is wrong. It's useless for me to have actors so much in their heads that they can't be organic.

Very occasionally I hire an actor and get it wrong. The actor just doesn't trust the process or me as fully as I thought they would. In this case, you can be quite sure that if an actor is untrusting, it's got nothing to do with me or the process.

In the first place, I'm pretty thorough about whom I choose. I instinctively look for the kind of actor who is going to be trusting. There are all kinds of insecure people out there called actors.

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.

The notion that acting is simply about intuitively responding to situations the way you feel couldn't be farther away from how I ask actors to work.

There are plenty of bad actors and there are plenty of bad directors. There are actors who will always be bad and there are good actors who you cry for because they're being badly directed or the material isn't good enough.

I think Michael Caine is a perfectly good actor but it's obvious he's not going to be in one of my films.