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 was a little girl with a pot belly and Afro puffs, hyperactive and overdramatic, and I found the theater and I found my home.
In my experience, when you're writing, you want the truth, and you don't want to be apologetic in any way. But there is something in writing, the complexity of it, that works against that aim.
A good poet's made as well as born.
Criticism does not disturb me, for I am my own severest critic. Always in my playing I strive to surpass myself, and it is this constant struggle that makes music fascinating to me.
I'm just glad that I'm the musical equivalent of a character actress, because blues singers can keep singing and having an audience at 35, and someone like Madonna's gonna have to find something else to do, 'cos I don't care how pointy those bras are that she wears, they're still gonna look a little odd when she's 55!
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
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