Best 76 quotes of Ralph Fiennes on MyQuotes

Ralph Fiennes

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    Ralph Fiennes

    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.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    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.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    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.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    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.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    Education, awareness and prevention are the key, but stigmatisation and exclusion from family is what makes people suffer most

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    Ralph Fiennes

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

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    Ralph Fiennes

    God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    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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    Ralph Fiennes

    Having gone through editing process, I can see that in actor's faces there's point where they're not managing their performance and that's, I think, the best place to be. You've done the homework, you've learned the lines, at that point you just sort of let it out.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    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.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    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.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I couldn't get as big as a bodybuilder. I tried to put on as much weight in the right places as I could. My weightlifting was impressive for me, but not for some of the guys I see down at the gym.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I don't feel I'm playing villains all the time.

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    Ralph Fiennes

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

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    Ralph Fiennes

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

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I feel there's so much still to learn about acting. But there is some magic in the capturing of performance and in the process of editing a performance. The psychology of human beings and what's coming through the face... that fascinates me.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I felt it [Shakespeare's Coriolanus] is sort of an examination of our dysfunction as a nationalistic, tribal entities. I think the world is rocking and cracking open in weird and worrying places. And I think Coriolanus, the play, reflected that.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I have a great editor and I enjoy, in a masochistic way, being ruthless about my own performance. How do I know, but I think I'm quite good at saying, "That's no good. That's no good. That's it. That's it. That's good." And I'm with the editor who goes, "No, I think you're wrong. That's not your best." There's an initial point in the editing, if you're directing yourself, especially in my case, where you go, "Ouch, ouch, ouch, I can't watch this." And then, there's a point where you become hard-nosed and just take your neurosis away and go, "What's working? That's okay. That's okay. We can lose that, and lose that." You get objective about it.

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    Ralph Fiennes

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

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I learned a lot about acting - watching not just myself but other actors and learning how to distinguish between two great takes. It's also about one's own taste in performance.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I like to keep fit, but I never lift very heavy weights...

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I loved doing Harry Potter. I had a great time on that. And I think it's good to have a mix. I think you're learning all the time.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I'm interested in the spirits of people. In the theatre, 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.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I'm not very good at being domesticated. I've tried. The domestic life I find claustrophobic - the rituals and habits and patterns.

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    Ralph Fiennes

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

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    Ralph Fiennes

    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.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don't over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    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.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I should say, a piece of advice that was given to me very early on by the principle of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) which is where I went. When he auditioned me, he said, "Your speech, monologue, is fine. It's good. Yeah, I think you have ability but you're making it happen. Don't make it happen, let it happen." And that's a sort of subtle shift I think, as an actor.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I spent the past week here in India getting a sense of the reality of HIV and AIDS in people's lives. Fathers and mothers are dying, leaving children with no support. Stigma and discrimination is ruining the family lives. There is an urgent need for education, information, and increased awareness of HIV and AIDS. The response needs to be now. We cannot afford to become fatigued.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I think I feel more like you're an actor for hire and you take the jobs you want to take, obviously, and some pay well and some don't pay well at all but you go on a gut feeling and it's all a big adventure.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    It's great to be on a set where there's time and there's focus and there's also a kind of adrenaline thrill on a set where people are saying: "We have to get this shot, we've have to go, we've got to move on!

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    Ralph Fiennes

    It's not great if someone gives you sort of bland praise without giving you clear direction and say, "This is good, let's try it like this." I have worked with someone who seemed quite inarticulate and just would say, "That's good, that's good." That's very frustrating because - it's nice to know something is good but you know it can always change.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    It's thrilling to have the opportunity to work in different areas, whether it's on a project that has all the resources behind it like Harry Potter or James Bond and then to go somewhere there's very few resources.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    It [the scene] can be something given to you and you go, "Ah this is a good idea, I can work with this." Sometimes it cuts right across your instinct and that's when I might resist. Even if the director might be insistent, I think it's very important to say, "Look, I'm not feeling this. I'll try to make it work but I got to let you know.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    I was grateful to have two weeks to shoot this one scene in Harry Potter. It's a big, big scene, but they have to deliver. And they have high expectations.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    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.

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    Ralph Fiennes

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

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    Ralph Fiennes

    Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film of this scale. Our producer decided that for the film to really work it had to be in Kenya.

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    Ralph Fiennes

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

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    Ralph Fiennes

    Like anything to do with trust, in any relationship it emerges and just the chemistry, vibe between two people an actor and a director. You just know whether this is someone I like to be with whose interaction with me I believe in.

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    Ralph Fiennes

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

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    Ralph Fiennes

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

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    Ralph Fiennes

    News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising - not just at an executive level, but on the floor, in the warehouse. A man is packing a box of oral rehydration tablets; maternity kits are being prepared; education kits are being packed. And somewhere, tomorrow, those boxes will be unpacked and a child with life-threatening diarrhoea will be saved, a baby will be born in more hygienic circumstances, a girl will receive her first exercise book and her first pencil.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    People fear they won’t get what they want.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    Performance is made in the editing room, and I've come to see the truth in that - the idea that they say performances are usually made in the editing room because what you film is the raw material. I think just going through the process of saying, "Which take do we use? Why is that the take we want? I want that take can you edit again, I'm not sure that's the one, I think it's this one." And just because you go through that process, I think somehow it's made me sort of more open about the [actor's] possibilities.

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    Ralph Fiennes

    Ridicule is also a weapon against forces of evil. Really clever, intelligent ridicule.