I think Hollywood has a class system. The actors are like the inmates, but the truth is they're running the asylum.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that while actors may seem confined by the industry, they actually hold significant power and influence within it.
In this quote, Robert De Niro compares Hollywood to a classical asylum where the actors, who appear to be restricted or controlled, are actually the ones in charge. The metaphor highlights the paradox of how those who seem to be seen as mere performers within the industry possess the authority and creativity that drive the entire system of filmmaking. This statement prompts us to reconsider appearances of power and control in any hierarchical structure.
In practice
In a conversation about the entertainment industry, one might quote De Niro to illustrate how actors influence film production.
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 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.
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 thatβs 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.
I have always given it as my decided opinion that no nation had a right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another; that every one had a right to form and adopt whatever government they liked best to live under themselves.
It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.
Realization is not knowledge about the universe, but the living experience of the nature of the universe. Until we have such living experience, we remain dependent on examples, and subject to their limits.
Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty three degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind.
To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.
Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
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