Strasberg, the most famous and financially successful teacher of our day, helped some people — Al Pacino and Ellen Burstyn swear by him. Other, equally excellent actors abominate him. Stella Adler, a spirited and flamboyant teacher who emphasizes characterization and role interpretation rather than emotional recall, came to her class the morning after Lee died and ordered them all to stand. "A man of the theatre died last night," she announced. For one minute, the members of her group, a large one, stood, some with heads bowed, all silent. Then Miss Adler ordered them to sit and said, "It will take a hundred years before the harm that man has done to the art of acting can be corrected." ... I think she might finally admit, with some nudging, that she learned a great deal from Lee in the Group’s first years. I can speak for myself; despite the negative impressions I formed more recently, I owe Lee a great deal and owe to the movement Harold and he started, the Group Theatre, everything. Because I was an actor — and could not possibly have been one without their help or outside their theatre — I’ve learned never to be afraid of actors, so I’ve never treated them, when I was making films, as counters in a game to be moved about as I pleased. I’ve never wished them struck dumb, always opened myself to their imaginations and benefited by their suggestions. I’ve been able to remain undisturbed by the questioning that other directors resent...No one who came out of the Group and now teaches does it precisely the same way or with the same emphasis. Sanford Meisner, Robert Lewis, Stella Adler, and Paul Mann have all helped actors become artists...But they are each extremely individual in their work and I’ve heard all four scorned by their own kind.
— Elia Kazan, A Life.
Acting teachers tend to disparage each other’s methods...But despite that, the teachers I’ve mentioned make the same basic emphasis, which is fundamental: Experience on the stage must be actual, not suggested by external imitation; the actor must be going through what the character he’s playing is going through; the emotion must be real, not pretended; it must be happening, not indicated...To indicate is the cardinal sin in acting. Yet even this is open to question. Some great actors imitate the outside and “work in” from there. Laurence Olivier, for one. Larry needs to know first of all how the person he’s to play walks, stands, sits, dresses; he has to hear in his memory’s ear the voice of the man whom he’s going to imitate. I lived across the street from him at the time I was directing his wife, Vivien Leigh, in the film of A Streetcar Named Desire, and would often drop over to see him. Larry was working with Willy Wyler on Sister Carrie and, as ever, concentrating on what might seem to “us” to be insignificant aspects of his characterization. I remember pausing outside a window late one Sunday morning and, undetected, watching Larry go through the pantomime of offering a visitor a chair. He’d try it this way, then that, looking at the guest, then at the chair, doing it with a host's flourish, doing it with a graceless gesture, then thrusting it brusquely forward...always seeking the most revealing way to do what would be a quickly passing bit of stage business for any other actor...Which way is better? As in all art, both. There is content and there is form. The artistry is in the passion; it is equally in the way the passion is expressed. Perhaps the problem we have to deal with is how to create an expressive form within which the spontaneous life, the one that yields the unexpected, the dazzling surprise, is free to work. The greatest actors are known for giving the same performance a little differently each night—but it is the same performance in all essentials. Both techniques are important: turning your emotional resources on and off, this way and that, while at the same time directing the cunning of your body to the most telling external behavior.
— Elia Kazan, A Life
My dear boy, why don't you try acting? It's so much easier.
— Sir Laurence Olivier, (allegedly) on learning that Dustin Hoffman had remained awake for 72 hours in preparation for a scene in Marathon Man in which his character is sleep deprived.
I always say about people doing Method acting, you only ever see people doing Method when they’re playing an asshole. You never see someone just being lovely to everyone going, "I’m really deep in character."
Question: How did Tom Hanks prepare for the role of Fred Rogers?
Answer: Acting is just not that hard.
Answer: Acting is just not that hard.
—The Onion, "5 Things To Know About A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"
It’s bullshit. What if it’s a shit film – what do you think you achieved? Am I impressed that you didn’t drop character? You should have dropped it from the beginning! How do you prepare for a serial killer? You gonna spend two years checking it out?
It’s ridiculous. How would you portray death if you had to experience it first?
Method actors give you a photograph. Real actors give you an oil painting.
[It's] the most self-aggrandizing, selfish, narcissistic f—ing bollocks I have ever seen. When younger, I think it’s quite common to think that completely losing yourself is the goal [of acting] because it feels grown-up and it feels proper. But the older I’ve got, the more I don’t really look to that. To be honest, it’s quite a pain in the arse when someone ‘loses themselves.’ It is a massive pain in the arse because it’s no longer a craft and a job.
There's something of me in every character I play. Anyone who says they can completely vanish inside a character is either a lunatic or a liar.
"I tend to identify with my roles to such an extent that I appear to be totally convinced about certain statements that, in real life, I would never believe in."
