I spent lunchtime in a grave during the filming of 'Bloody Mama.' When you're younger, you feel that's what you need to do to help you stay in character. When you get older, you become more confident and less intense about it - and you can achieve the same effect.
Interpretation
The quote reflects an actor's evolving approach to character immersion over time.
Robert De Niro shares his experience of how, in his younger years, he felt the need to fully immerse himself in a role to stay in character, even to the extreme of spending time in a grave. As he aged, he grew more confident and realized that he could achieve depth in his performances without such intense measures, highlighting a transition from reliance on extreme methods to a more nuanced understanding of acting.
In practice
In a discussion about method acting at a film festival.
You never know what you do that could be totally out of left field, which actually might work and give something fresh to the whole scene, to the character, whatever. If you have that with a director who then knows how to shape it, either in the direction, in the moment, or in the editing, then that's good.
I think Hollywood has a class system. The actors are like the inmates, but the truth is they're running the asylum.
The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.
If you're an actor, always be true to your character. If you are not an actor, have character and always be true to yourself.
You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
When I'm in Senegal, I can't just sit in isolation making music. People need my help. And the Senegalese people helped create my music. It comes from the country itself.
A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
There is a communication of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love.
This is the role of writers: to turn their tears into a story - and perhaps into a prayer.
My fashion is about the urban woman in the year 3000. I think about obscure, weird things and try to create a world around them.
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