“You are not supposed to feel, you are supposed to do.” – Yasujiro Ozu

“What happens with great actors … is that they unmask you, bring dreams that you’ve had, but haven’t expressed, to light.” — Jean Renoir [speaking on Michel Simon]

“acting is about what you take away from yourself to reveal the truth of what you’re doing. A performance when it deserves to be considered great or important is entirely made-up of the actor himself and entirely achieved by what he has left in the dressing room before he came out in front of the camera.  There is no such thing as becoming another character by putting on a lot of make-up. What you’re really doing is undressing yourself and even tearing yourself apart and presenting to the public that part of you which corresponds to what you are playing…The actor is someone able to eliminate those things of himself that will interfere with that truth” – Orson Welles

“To me actors are the most important thing in the world … they are the instruments of interpretation. There will always be people who sit down and write stories and there will always be people who will want to direct them, to make them into films, but it becomes increasingly more difficult to find people to interpret those films, because there is so little value or respect given to those people. It isn’t the typewritten word you see up there, it’s people … and if they don’t interpret with some human feeling that the audience can relate to … well, I think that films will be in trouble eventually.” – John Cassavetes, here with Gena Rowlands

” ‘Play it like an old gentleman. Don’t make me crazy with your actor tricks.’ ” – Andre Wilms quoting Aki Kaurismaki. Here in Il Était Une Fois….Le Havre.