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.
A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.
All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.
Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge
I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture.
All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
Fashion is the science of appearance, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
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