Kevin Spacey Quotes (39 Quotes)


    She found a kind of possession of this role, ... There were moments during filming that I was just startled at where she was going.

    Directing a film was something I was yearning to do. I always wanted to see if I had the capacity to be a good storyteller.

    I open myself up every time I walk on screen and give you everything that I am. There are parts of me that are in every movie that I've done. That to me is what my job is.

    I mean we all played as kids. You play games, you take on different characters, you imitate; the fun and the love of play has never left me.

    Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higer the fences get.


    If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart; if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!

    For me, coming to work every day has turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be.

    I liked it because it was such a dangerous script and showed just what human beings are capable of. Here was a movie in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, who always win in every movie they ever do, simply don't win. I felt that was outrageous for a commercial movie.

    And I certainly won't lay out areas of my life that I think are just private.

    Secondarily, I think films that are driven by music also terrify studios.

    I've been on sets where things weren't relaxed because someone was creating tension for no reason.

    Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.

    It's a remarkable play, very funny and provocative and challenging, and to have a new work is a double whammy for us,

    I feel it's a responsibility for anyone who breaks through a certain ceiling... to send the elevator back down and give others a helpful lift.

    I don't think that, 18 months in, anyone needs to apologize for having done a program that has brought 425,000 people into the theater. We must be doing something right even though 11 or 12 people who write for newspapers don't particularly like what we've done.

    The next day I was in my school's production of All My Sons. This was the performance where I realized something was happening between me and the audience that I hadn't recognized before.

    Surrounding the death penalty issue is a lot of controversy and very passionate views. People tend to be on one side very strongly or the other side very strongly, and I actually don't end up on either side.

    It's a journey towards truthfulness, towards reality. I think that's a wonderful challenge for Kevin Spacey - he's a great actor and what he has demonstrated on film many times is a wonderful truthfulness.

    Arthur Miller had hoped it would premiere in London and was so pleased the possibility was in the air that it would come to the Old Vic because he loved this theater. We want to see that particular dream of Miller's come true.

    You try to do the best work that you can do to give audiences something that maybe they haven't seen before and keep challenging yourself.

    I'm not out there trying to get press for myself nor am I trying to convince anybody that I'm living any kind of a life. I'm actually trying to convince people: I don't want you to know what I'm living, because it's none of your business.

    My life will change, because I want it to change; and also because this is something I'm committed to doing and that I believe my life has been leading towards.

    But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.

    I'm aware that, from the outside, this looks like I've got quite an ego.

    I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.

    I'm lucky if I find one movie a year that's worth doing, and when I do find one, it usually only takes 20-30 days to shoot.

    You know walking your dog in the park is a perfectly normal thing to do, but you know I think that they are always trying to, you know, (say) 'What was he doing in that park at 4.30 a.m.' My doggy had to go

    It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.

    It's a great thriller or mystery, but on another level it's a film about the fact that, if you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what you're told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face.

    I'm supposed to convince you, for two hours, that I'm somebody else. Now if you know everything about my life, if you think you've got me figured out and you think you know all my dark secrets, how am I ever going to convince you that I'm somebody else?

    Everyone was completely open and honest about the fact the show wasn't where it should have gotten, but I can tell you that after the critics' night, that cast pulled themselves together. They started to deliver that play in a way that I think audiences saw a much better production than those critics saw.

    As the years have gone on, I find one of the dangers of watching dailies... is you fall in love with moments.

    makes people think ... and have a healthy debate and an open debate, rather than being so fiercely on one side or the other.

    I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman.

    Sometimes the person who is the most logical is the person whom we call insane.

    Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies.

    I'm not someone who's led my life trying to get publicity; I'd rather do my work and go home.

    I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid.

    Am I now supposed to go on Oprah and cry and tell you my deepest, darkest secrets because you want to know?


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