Ralph Fiennes Quotes (68 Quotes)


    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.

    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.

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

    A Merchant Ivory film, It's quite hard to finance this kind of film, so there's a sort of pressure to move through the day and get it done.

    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.


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

    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.

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

    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.

    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.

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

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

    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.

    I don't think I can be a spokesperson about the problems (concerning the pharmaceutical industry), but the key area of concern is accessibility of drugs, especially for malaria, HIV and tuberculosis. The drugs exist but are they getting to the people that need them

    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.

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

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

    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.

    Justin investigates his wife's death and what she was investigating and there's -- people are after him to stop him. They don't want the information to get out, and they will do anything to stop him.

    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 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.

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

    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.

    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.

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

    Justin's journey traces not only what Tessa was investigating he's also playing detective about their relationship. This man rediscovers and re-assesses his own relationship with his wife. It's a wonderful part, because he goes from being a reticent nice guy to being someone who is forced to confront some pretty tough truths about the world. I hope that the audience sees him as a kind of 'everyman.'

    Is a fiction film particularly well equipped to do the kind of work we usually associate with investigative or advocacy journalism No, I don't think it can be, especially if it has to serve a dramatic narrative, ... Everyone asks questions about the polemical side of the film, but for me it's also about a relationship between two people, their openness with each other, or their decision as a couple not to share, thinking they're respecting each other's privacy. People don't always tell each other what they need to knownot because they've got anything to hide, like a love affair, but because they don't want to invade. Our ability to be honest with each other, to say, I want this or I don't want that, it's all a distant cousin of what happens on the level of social policy, and it's who we are, isn't it Politics starts in the bedroom.

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

    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.

    When you get to over 40 and people are killing each other still around the world and blowing each other up, it gets a bit sort of depressing.

    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

    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.

    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.

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

    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.

    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.

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

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

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

    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.

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

    Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.

    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,

    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.

    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 i

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

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

    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.


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