It used to be the one or the other, right? You were the 'bad girl' or the 'good girl' or the 'bad mother' or the 'good mother,' 'the horrible businesswoman who eschewed her children' or 'the earth mother who was happy to be at home baking pies,' all of that stuff that we sort of knew was a lie.
Annette BeningYou end up loving every character that you play but a lot of the people I've played, I should just say for myself, I played, I wouldn't necessarily want to continue playing them. I've done them. It's like going on a trip. You go, you're amazed, you're glad you're there but you're glad to get home. And that's how I feel most of the time.
Annette BeningYou can't ask the guy with the checkbook to always be the person. So, we actors have to try. And believe me, it's not just young people who are struggling with this, trying to get things of substance made because of the proliferation of technology that it's just harder and harder to get things that really matter made. But they are being done and you just have to fight the good fight and try to... if you have something that you have written, you have to do your best to try to get it made in whatever way you can.
Annette BeningI still remember the five points of salesmanship: attention, interest, conviction, desire and close.
Annette BeningAnd if there's anything movies can do in a way that I just love, and I love as an audience is, "Show me something I don't know about. Show me something I haven't seen."
Annette BeningI've always been pretty levelheaded. In show business you need to have a certain internal stability.
Annette BeningModern acting is method acting, most of it. And there are sort of different schools, so I guess I'm not really from one school or another. I had a number of different teachers but they were all kind of drawing from the same pool, which is - What do you want? What are you doing to get what you want? And, what is in the way? These are basic acting questions. Knowing the answers to those questions. So you're talking about objectives and actions and obstacles. That's a sort of shorthand that gives you a language.
Annette Bening