Best 104 quotes of John Hurt on MyQuotes

John Hurt

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    Acting is an imaginative leap, really. And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able - I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able - I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    [Alfred] Hitchcock was very interested in the image on the screen.As is any good cinema director. That is the language they speak. It is not literature, it is images on screen.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    Also the wonderful thing about film, you can see light at the end of the tunnel. You did realize that it is going to come to an end at some stage.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    Anything which retains interest is optimistic. When the characters become disinterested, it's pessimistic. Does that make sense?

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    A very, very impressive director, Tomas Alfredson. It's only his second film [ 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'], but he's a real find.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    Be true to what you want to say, or whatever style it is that you've chosen or genre you've chosen. Do it well! My criteria always has been that the piece must stand the chance of succeeding on the level it's intended to succeed on.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    Bong Joon-ho is enormously sensitive to performance. He knows what he needs to see and that's all he needs to shoot. He is so daring. We don't do that in the west. We shoot everything.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    [Bong Joon-ho'] is quite different but technically, he is as clever as [Alfred] Hitchcock. That's saying something. In humanitarian terms, I think he is much cleverer. He is one of the best directors I've worked with. I absolutely adore working with him.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    By the time I came to do the final ones [Harry Potter's film], I was working on something that was massively successful. There was a huge difference in indulgence and all sorts of stuff. A very big difference in peoples' attitudes. They were very pleased with themselves. In human terms, it was quite interesting to see the difference.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    By the very nature of being a clergyman's son, people tend to put you slightly apart, which is - you tend to live a life, at some stages, as being - people being suspicious of you and puts you rather on a - I don't mean lonely, particularly. But it does tend to put you apart.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    Each day, as you get older, there is a new perspective on life. It's a progression of some sort.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    Elephant Man [movie] was much more difficult physically. This had a couple of days. It was quite tricky. I had my leg strapped up behind me and I am a little older now. It was all marvelous, though. He [Bong Joon-ho] is one of the most fabulous directors in the world.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    Film has changed vastly in the time that I've been an actor, and it's, I think, very much for the better. I think there are just magnificent films now, and they're blossoming in the way that the novel did years ago.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    Films don't take as long as people think. 'Harry Potter,' people always used to say, 'Well, my God, do you ever get any time to yourself?' I think I did, in 'Harry Potter,' over a 12 year period I did five days. So it's not exactly exhausting.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    From John Huston to Fred Zinnemann and Richard Fleischer and all those great American directors.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I do what interests me when I'm invited and do it as well as I know how and try to get better. That's all.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    If I'm in theatre, cinema doesn't even cross my mind. Similarly when I'm making a film, theatre doesn't cross my mind.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I find it difficult to say, like "which child do you prefer the most", and its a sort of surface choice. I've never known how to quite answer that one adequately.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I find myself more interested in producing. Not because I'm interested in the financial side of it, but just getting together the right elements to make a film, that side of production. I would not be good on the financial side. It would be a disaster from the beginning.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time, to say high Anglo-Catholic would be a real English understatement.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    If it's a low-brow bawdy comedy, it's got to stand the chance of succeeding as such. If it's an intellectual piece, a drama, and so forth. And of course, once you've determined the level of the piece, do it the best you know how. And then don't make concessions. To audiences, or to pursestrings, or whatever.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    If you've got a great crew it's intense, but its quite short. 'The Elephant Man' was longer than most, for an independent film. That was a 14 week film. But it was because of the intrinsic difficulties. We had to invent a different way of filming, because the makeup was so long. A working day for me with a full makeup on was nineteen hours. So obviously you couldn't do that twice running.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I got used to [ Lars Von Trier] doing the narration for 'Dogville' and 'Manderley.' And I said to him I do these narrations for you but you never put me in a film! So he called my bluff and put me in 'Melancholia' and I was thrilled about that.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I have lots of favourite memories but I can't say that I have a favourite film.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I left drama school and went straight into a 10-week film for which I was paid £75 I might say, which for 1962 was one heck of a lot of money.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers! How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything!

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I loved working with [ Lars Von Trier], but I've done two films before, so I was quite used to him.He's a man of incredible moods of course, but he's also a hugely perceptive man, and there's no getting away from that. And he's able to put that perception into something like film, so we're very lucky.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I love working with Lars [von Trier]! I've worked with him three times. I did the narration of Dogville and Manderlay.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I'm really the addition of other peoples' imagination, quite honestly. It's what they see me as, and I'm very happy to comply. I find things are more varied that way.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    In anything really, it's finding the reality. You can't be 'real,' but you can create a reality. And that created reality is what the audience believes in. And that's essential. Because if the audience doesn't believe that, they're never going to trust you. And if they don't trust you, you can't lead them up the mountain.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I never quite understand why we watch the news. There doesn't really seem much point watching somebody tell you what the news is when you could quite easily listen to it on the radio...

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    In the end, the game is the same. Football is still football. Now, they may play with different formations, they may have a different idea of training, but the game doesn't alter. I don't mind how any performer - indeed, why should I? How arrogant of me if I did? - manages to get to what they have to get to. It doesn't matter how you get there, as long as it isn't going to destroy other people on the way.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    In the States it's more and more difficult to get an independent film off the ground, and you certainly wont get the opportunity to play something like that in a studio movie.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I often say, with something like 'The Elephant Man,' had it been an American series for television, where you have to sign your life away for seven years...well, maybe I would never have made 'Sailcloth.'

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I stopped asking a long time ago, "why would you want me to play that?" I'm an actor. That's what I do.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I think I'd rather do [acting] in the real place. It requires different things, working with green screen, but its an imaginative exercise anyway, the whole business of acting, so it just gives you a bit more to feed the imagination. Unless it's really silly, just two of you stuck in a space with nothing but green screen that's got to be pretty difficult.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I think it's interesting to see how things come into and go out of fashion.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I think it would be very difficult to play somebody if they didn't think they had any virtues or redeeming characteristics.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I think [ Lars Von Trier] is a fantastic filmmaker. No question. You've got to be ready for him. He's sharp and he's got a sharp tongue and I love that. He doesn't mind it back.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I think one of the things that is important, for me, though a lot of people would disagree with me, is that you be founded in theater so that you understand what an audience is, what kind of an animal it is and how to play with it. How to have fun with it, how to sympathize with it, all the things that an audience is. I don't think you're going to find that out unless you do theater.

  • By Anonym
    John Hurt

    I think particularly Daniel [Radcliffe], he knows what he's doing. I'm sure he'll finish up a producer. He really realized what it was, knew the size of it. And it was gigantic, the biggest franchise [Harry Potter] in history.