Ralph Fiennes Quotes on Movies (17 Quotes)

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What I liked about the story is that it throws up all these questions. The movie teases the audience. 'Is she having an affair'

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.

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