Ralph Fiennes Quotations

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.

You have to just dive over the edge. You haven't got time to mess about.

One of the things that binds us as a family is a shared sense of humor.

We'd all like to believe that perhaps people could stop killing each other.

I'm sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.

There is a humanitarian impulse that one aspires to and there are days when one doesn't do it very well.

I went out to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I thought was very beautiful, but there were a lot of people there.

I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.

There is a tension in relationships between wanting to return to the womb, but also wanting to be free. Because sometimes the woman's attentions can be overly maternal, and you want to go, 'Ahhhh!'

Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.

Little moments can have a feeling and a texture that is very real.

I tried to play rugby but was never very good.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

I admire the world of the books and the characters that she's created, but I'm not an addict of Harry Potter. I don't feel possessive about it.

Gardeners are good at nurturing, and they have a great quality of patience, they're tender. They have to be persistent.

He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.

When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.

God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.

I'm not very good at being domesticated. I've tried. The domestic life I find claustrophobic - the rituals and habits and patterns.

You feel yourself working to show something. I've learned to distrust that feeling.

There are those moments when you shake someone's hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment.

Going to the movies was a big event in my youth. My father would be the initiator - he'd have me put on a jacket to see a film.

I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things.

I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.

When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.

It was just two energies between two people, you can't prescribe that.

The film depends on the audience's belief in this relationship.

I don't feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they're extremely well informed.

I don't plan a career. That doesn't work for me. I just have to go with my gut.

I like to keep fit, but I never lift very heavy weights.

I've never felt fallow in the sense that there's been no work.

What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.

You're meant to be playing the distillation of evil, which can be anything.

As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.

I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about and offer up. It would be odd not to have ideas about something.

Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.

I couldn't get as big as a bodybuilder. I tried to put on as much weight in the right places as I could. My weightlifting was impressive for me, but not for some of the guys I see down at the gym.

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

I was grateful to have two weeks to shoot this one scene in Harry Potter. It's a big, big scene, but they have to deliver. And they have high expectations.

I was only interested in my scene, and I had to go through thousands and thousands of other scenes. I got my scene and I read it many, many, many, many, many times. That was my research.

I guess I'd love to be surprised by something I had never thought of.

The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can't eat.

I can't go and shoot people in the back of the head because It's a kids' movie, which is actually quite a good test because you haven't got the overt threat of a knife in the face.

I don't feel I'm playing villains all the time.

When I first filmed things, they were always slightly awkward.

You dread that there will be real problems during filming.

And although I've been very fortunate in the film work that's come my way, I need to get back to the stage. If I'm away for a maximum of two years, I feel something's wrong.

I respond to a part just intuitively when I read a script.

I veer away from trying to understand why I act. I just know I need to do it.

If I had a gun to my head and I had to choose between theater and film I'd choose theater.

In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.

Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film.

The sets were fantastic. The Harry Potter sets are brilliant. You do get transported for a second.

There's a lot of people who feel there's a tabloid journalist who had it coming.

In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system.

There's a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer.

Yes, it's depressing when there's a lack of clean water and sanitation, ... But here are people living lives of vitality. I only felt welcomed.

There are two equal parts to this movie,

On these things we don't really know until it is asked of us.

But that's why we have marketing and why I'm talking to people like you,

But experience has shown us time and time again, country after country, that it will be there.

I don't think he's that complicated to begin with,

he says at the end of a flood of interviews. ''I hate this word. I don't see them as tortured. I see them as people. I suppose I'm drawn to the chance to show the complexity at the center of the drama.

I think he falls in love with her all over again after she's gone and as he uncovers what she had been up to -- her work to uncover a vast and very corrupt corporate and political conspiracy. It's particularly intriguing since -- for much of the early part of the film -- Justin is suspicious of her; thinking she was having an affair. I think the film asks questions about relationships between people and personal honesty. The honesty between couples and not just at the level of betrayal, but just about simple communication.

Justin was a chance to play what I don't quite succeed at. There's a bit of Justin that I'm not, but I'd like to be,

Justin's journey traces not only what Tessa was investigating, he's also playing detective about their relationship,

Justin sees something in Tessa. She's getting at him,

Justin isn't going to respond angrily ... he's going to carefully say, 'What was she doing?

That's the last thing that I would do. I wouldn't be that patronizing.

You just want to find that little thing.

The patience, the tenacity of the gardener for me, it's the spirit of Tessa.

When you go to areas that have poverty of that level, you're ready to feel shocked and some degree of shame, coming in as a rich westerner.

We were in real places, with real people. That is Fernando's gift. The Kenyan background is like an extra character, an active pulse within the drama.

We were in real places, with real people. That is Fernando's gift, ... The Kenyan background is like an extra character, an active pulse within the drama.

We were in real places, with real people. That is Fernando's gift.

Fernando has a particular shooting style, ... which you might call guerrilla or documentary. He wants to avoid anything that smacks of a camera setup. It's as if the street informs the camera.

There's only one day to shoot one scene, you don't get a second chance. You've got to say, This is what I feel. Could I try this?

Any idealistic activity outside of my work is something confined to a few field trips with UNICEF in Uganda,

It's the sort of part, not unlike Hamlet, maybe, where the actor brings their cloth to it.

It shows the kind of man he is. To allow any emotion would be unseemly for him,

Daniel had to put up with a lot from me. Here's a boy who's tied up with a man pushing his finger into the wound on his head, laughing and delighting in the pain he's causing. He had to act as though he was in agony and terror without having many words to say. I was full of admiration for him.

It was latent in him. He doesn't change character, ... It's not in his nature to be confrontational or create any tension. Good gardeners have to have a very quiet tenacity and insistence about them. This constancy, this determination, is in Justin, but it's not high octane. I like that, that people don't get it all in the beginning.

They made his exterior very simple so you can see the evil inside,

I'm interested in the spirits of people. In the theater, there's the acting part of acting -- and I'm not saying that can't be great -- and there's the essence. To explore that essence, you need a key, a look, a gesture, an insight that unlocks the person's soul.

I'm an avid reader of magazines like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books , ... Sometimes they have articles about what big corporations are up to.

It has happened and it can happen again.

He said Quayle's the sort who'd be good at rowing or playing rugby, ... I know rugby players. They run hard and they tackle hard, but then they go off the field and they can be quite gentle.

You want to have a critical success and you want people to go see it. It's disappointing if something's well reviewed and no one goes to see it.

Performance is made in the editing room, and I've come to see the truth in that - the idea that they say performances are usually made in the editing room because what you film is the raw material. I think just going through the process of saying, "Which take do we use? Why is that the take we want? I want that take can you edit again, I'm not sure that's the one, I think it's this one." And just because you go through that process, I think somehow it's made me sort of more open about the [actor's] possibilities.

I felt it [Shakespeare's Coriolanus] is sort of an examination of our dysfunction as a nationalistic, tribal entities. I think the world is rocking and cracking open in weird and worrying places. And I think Coriolanus, the play, reflected that.

Having gone through editing process, I can see that in actor's faces there's point where they're not managing their performance and that's, I think, the best place to be. You've done the homework, you've learned the lines, at that point you just sort of let it out.

I learned a lot about acting - watching not just myself but other actors and learning how to distinguish between two great takes. It's also about one's own taste in performance.

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, "No here, don't do that, go there."

I feel there's so much still to learn about acting. But there is some magic in the capturing of performance and in the process of editing a performance. The psychology of human beings and what's coming through the face... that fascinates me.

I should say, a piece of advice that was given to me very early on by the principle of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) which is where I went. When he auditioned me, he said, "Your speech, monologue, is fine. It's good. Yeah, I think you have ability but you're making it happen. Don't make it happen, let it happen." And that's a sort of subtle shift I think, as an actor.

I have a great editor and I enjoy, in a masochistic way, being ruthless about my own performance. There's an initial point in the editing, if you're directing yourself, especially in my case, where you go, "Ouch, ouch, ouch, I can't watch this." And then, there's a point where you become hard-nosed and just take your neurosis away and go, "What's working? That's okay. That's okay. We can lose that, and lose that." You get objective about it.

It [the scene] can be something given to you and you go, "Ah this is a good idea, I can work with this." Sometimes it cuts right across your instinct and that's when I might resist. Even if the director might be insistent, I think it's very important to say, "Look, I'm not feeling this. I'll try to make it work but I got to let you know."

It's not great if someone gives you sort of bland praise without giving you clear direction and say, "This is good, let's try it like this." I have worked with someone who seemed quite inarticulate and just would say, "That's good, that's good." That's very frustrating because - it's nice to know something is good but you know it can always change.

Like anything to do with trust, in any relationship it emerges and just the chemistry, vibe between two people [an actor and a director]. You just know whether this is someone I like to be with whose interaction with me I believe in.