John Hurt Quotes

There are certain people that when they ask you to do a film, you just say, "Where and when?"

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able - I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.

The only concession you can make is to what you believe is right.

We're all far too afraid of being so arrogant to say "Either you can or you can't."

Be true to what you want to say, or whatever style it is that you've chosen or genre you've chosen. Do it well! My criteria always has been that the piece must stand the chance of succeeding on the level it's intended to succeed on.

We all have our limitations.

[Bong Joon-ho'] is quite different but technically, he is as clever as [Alfred] Hitchcock. That's saying something. In humanitarian terms, I think he is much cleverer. He is one of the best directors I've worked with. I absolutely adore working with him.

I think it's interesting to see how things come into and go out of fashion.

This whole theory of alienation that intellectuals have been passing on, really is just to stop a lot of ham acting. If you fill something with a proper emotion, it didn't worry him at all.

The truth is rarely true and never simple.

Snowpiercer has both [optimistic and pessimistic]. It was essentially optimistic. The most pessimistic was my part, because of his knowledge. He knows how it started. The status quo, he knows, has to be maintained, otherwise there is no chance. He knows that this revolution is completely understandable and is also commendable. He also knows the negatives. In the end, that's not a very positive position to be in.

I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.

I stopped asking a long time ago, "why would you want me to play that?" I'm an actor. That's what I do.

Once you've started to dig a hole, you can't get out of it.

I am really the victim of other people's imagination.

I find myself more interested in producing. Not because I'm interested in the financial side of it, but just getting together the right elements to make a film, that side of production. I would not be good on the financial side. It would be a disaster from the beginning.

Often I don't read novels. The script is more important, that's the springboard to your imagination, really. Peripheral information can be interesting to read but you can't use it when it's not in the script.

People say you never retire in this [film] business and I say, well, not until they retire you.

You have to learn to cut your cloth accordingly. But it seems to be a human weakness. Once you start making a lot of money, you just join in with everyone else. It's like the banks, and we've seen what happens there.

I'm not accustomed to doing films without seeing the script. There are certain people that are auteurs, and you accept them regardless of whether you see a script or not. But Spielberg is not an auteur.

I think, you have to forget about intellect, to a degree. Intuition is very important when you're working with a lens, I believe, for what the lens is doing, too.

There may be arrangements to have me retired but I don't know. Things happen that I enjoy doing, and as long as I enjoy doing them I'll go about doing them, I guess.

I often say, with something like 'The Elephant Man,' had it been an American series for television, where you have to sign your life away for seven years...well, maybe I would never have made 'Sailcloth.'

I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.

One wonders sometimes, looking at the world, how it's dealing with itself. There are days when you wake up and you feel very optimistic and there are days when you feel pessimistic.

I've done lots of films with first directors, so it's not unusual for me.

I think an actor is very like a sportsman. You have periods where you're in terrific form. Everything you touch seems to work, and come right. And other times, when you're working really hard, it's okay, but it isn't scintillating.

I think it would be very difficult to play somebody if they didn't think they had any virtues or redeeming characteristics.

Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.

By the very nature of being a clergyman's son, people tend to put you slightly apart, which is - you tend to live a life, at some stages, as being - people being suspicious of you and puts you rather on a - I don't mean lonely, particularly. But it does tend to put you apart.

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.

Very, very broadly speaking, you can put directors into two areas: One for whom you work, and the other with whom you work. And I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons. It's a great relief to feel that you're working with someone rather than for someone. You don't feel that you're being tested, as it were.

I find it difficult to say, like "which child do you prefer the most", and its a sort of surface choice. I've never known how to quite answer that one adequately.

It's quite interesting, looking back at the first one [film about Harry Potter], nobody knew whether or not it was going to be successful as a film. The books were of course already very successful, but that's happened before, where the books were successful and the films weren't at all. But it turned out that they were.

I'm very director oriented.

From John Huston to Fred Zinnemann and Richard Fleischer and all those great American directors.

It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.

There is always a better choice that you were unable to quite touch with a single stroke. Even in acting, there comes a point, like a painting, where you have to say, "That's it. I can't go any further with it." And sometimes, you say, "I'm really pleased that that's where it's finished up." Other times, you think, "I don't think I really quite got there, but I haven't got time to go any further." Rather reluctantly, you have to say "That's it."

What I like about [Berthold] Brecht, it's very interesting. When Helene Weigel came over and somebody talked about Lotte Lenya and said "well, she wasn't alienating." And Weigel said "No, no, no. Why, Lotte Lenya was so true - who cares?" She said: "Berti only developed the theory of alienation in order to stop bad acting." I heard her say that. Now that's brilliant.

I'm really the addition of other peoples' imagination, quite honestly. It's what they see me as, and I'm very happy to comply. I find things are more varied that way.

The common misconception is that we create films for ourselves. And I really don't do it for myself. I get stopped in the street by people saying, "Do you mind if I say this about your work?" Do I mind? I'm delighted. I do it for you. It's not for me. It's my living, yes, sure.

[Alfred] Hitchcock was very interested in the image on the screen.As is any good cinema director. That is the language they speak. It is not literature, it is images on screen.

It's amazing how quickly human beings adapt, isn't it? It was such a great crew, and David [Lynch] was wonderful to work with [on 'The Elephant Man']. It was a very thrilling time, actually.

I have lots of favourite memories but I can't say that I have a favourite film.

I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever.

My fathers a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.

In anything really, it's finding the reality. You can't be 'real,' but you can create a reality. And that created reality is what the audience believes in. And that's essential. Because if the audience doesn't believe that, they're never going to trust you. And if they don't trust you, you can't lead them up the mountain.