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.
I happen to go for the simplest, most ordinary things. The extraordinary doesn't interest me. I'm not interested in psychotics. I'm interested in the person you don't expect to have a story. I like Everyman.
Without the aesthetic, the computer is but a mindless speed machine, producing effects without substance, form without relevant content, or content without meaningful form.
Silence... is the essence of the music itself, the vital ingredient that makes it possible for the music to exist at all.
The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it. As for myself, I'm not really sure who I am. I change every day.
Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.
I put one questions. For whom I compose? My answer is I wanted to address to all my people. And if I write music for the Greek people because I'm Greek, I compose for all the people.
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