I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.
Billy CrudupAll you really have when you're acting is the confidence and your ability to manage and tell a story by creating a character.
Billy CrudupYou can find the richness in any moment, even the most seemingly bleak. To try to do a movie about that was a joyful experience. So actually, it was really the context of it that made the experience so worthwhile, rather than the actual subject matter, if that makes sense.
Billy CrudupOne of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.
Billy CrudupI feel the film companies should pay for proper advertising to see that the movie will sell, instead of putting it on our backs.
Billy CrudupWhen you get many opportunities early on, and you have people who have been working for a while counting on you, you have to at least pretend that you know what you're doing. So any actor that's pretending, you start to develop philosophies. Without years and years of experience, you kind of go with an attitude that you know what you're doing. And so I think right around that time, I was kind of at the peak of rigidly thinking that I knew how to work in film in a way that I wanted to. Cameron was extremely patient and generous with me.
Billy Crudup