If you want to reach every person in the audience, it's not about being bigger, it's about going deeper.
Sanford MeisnerRead
The only way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of what you have to do under the imaginary circumstances. And as you develop you become confident. You come to believe in what you're doing and trust it because it's out of you.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of emotional truth and self-confidence in acting.
Sanford Meisner highlights that true acting involves tapping into one's emotional authenticity while engaging in imagined scenarios. As an actor grows and develops, they gain confidence in their craft, which helps them trust the portrayals they create, leading to more genuine performances.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of authenticity in art.
If you want to reach every person in the audience, it's not about being bigger, it's about going deeper.
Your acting will not be good until it is only yours. That's true of music, acting, anything creative. You work until finally nobody is acting like you.
Being an actor is a religious calling because you've been given the ability, the gift to inspire humanity. Think about that on the way to your soap opera audition.
Acting is the ability to live truthfully under the given imaginary circumstances
You can't learn to act unless you're criticized. If you tie that criticism to your childhood insecurities you'll have a terrible time. Instead, you must take criticism objectively, pertaining it only to the work being done.
Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.
Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent.
A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Maybe directors who are more interested in realism and naturalism come from cities, where they see things on their doorstep every day. But growing up as a kid in a very pretty but ever-so-slightly boring town, where not a great deal happened, encouraged me to be more escapist, more imaginative, and more of a daydreamer.
I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.
All my works are games, serious game.
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