Ralph Fiennes Quotes

God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.

The film depends on the audience's belief in this relationship.

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, "No here, don't do that, go there."

And although I've been very fortunate in the film work that's come my way, I need to get back to the stage. If I'm away for a maximum of two years, I feel something's wrong.

I veer away from trying to understand why I act. I just know I need to do it.

It's thrilling to have the opportunity to work in different areas, whether it's on a project that has all the resources behind it like Harry Potter or James Bond and then to go somewhere there's very few resources.

I don't plan a career. That doesn't work for me. I just have to go with my gut.

I guess I'd love to be surprised by something I had never thought of.

What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.

Unicef's education initiative does not seek to impose, but to initiate and integrate. It does, however, aim to address the huge bias towards education for boys at the expense of girls in so many cultures.

Going to the movies was a big event in my youth. My father would be the initiator - he'd have me put on a jacket to see a film.

Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film.

I felt it [Shakespeare's Coriolanus] is sort of an examination of our dysfunction as a nationalistic, tribal entities. I think the world is rocking and cracking open in weird and worrying places. And I think Coriolanus, the play, reflected that.

We are now living in a jungle where the strong eats the weak,we are not better than the Arabs to despise them.

Performance is made in the editing room, and I've come to see the truth in that - the idea that they say performances are usually made in the editing room because what you film is the raw material. I think just going through the process of saying, "Which take do we use? Why is that the take we want? I want that take can you edit again, I'm not sure that's the one, I think it's this one." And just because you go through that process, I think somehow it's made me sort of more open about the [actor's] possibilities.

Gardeners are good at nurturing, and they have a great quality of patience, they're tender. They have to be persistent.

I was grateful to have two weeks to shoot this one scene in Harry Potter. It's a big, big scene, but they have to deliver. And they have high expectations.

I have a great editor and I enjoy, in a masochistic way, being ruthless about my own performance. How do I know, but I think I'm quite good at saying, "That's no good. That's no good. That's it. That's it. That's good." And I'm with the editor who goes, "No, I think you're wrong. That's not your best." There's an initial point in the editing, if you're directing yourself, especially in my case, where you go, "Ouch, ouch, ouch, I can't watch this." And then, there's a point where you become hard-nosed and just take your neurosis away and go, "What's working? That's okay. That's okay. We can lose that, and lose that." You get objective about it.

When I first filmed things, they were always slightly awkward.

Education, awareness and prevention are the key, but stigmatisation and exclusion from family is what makes people suffer most

I admire the world of the books and the characters that she's created, but I'm not an addict of Harry Potter. I don't feel possessive about it.

I learned a lot about acting - watching not just myself but other actors and learning how to distinguish between two great takes. It's also about one's own taste in performance.

Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.

There's a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer.

I like to keep fit, but I never lift very heavy weights...

When you meet women, don't pretend to be anything that you're not.

We'd all like to believe that perhaps people could stop killing each other.

You're meant to be playing the distillation of evil, which can be anything.

It's not great if someone gives you sort of bland praise without giving you clear direction and say, "This is good, let's try it like this." I have worked with someone who seemed quite inarticulate and just would say, "That's good, that's good." That's very frustrating because - it's nice to know something is good but you know it can always change.

Like anything to do with trust, in any relationship it emerges and just the chemistry, vibe between two people an actor and a director. You just know whether this is someone I like to be with whose interaction with me I believe in.

I'm not very good at being domesticated. I've tried. The domestic life I find claustrophobic - the rituals and habits and patterns.

Ridicule is also a weapon against forces of evil. Really clever, intelligent ridicule.

I'm sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.

People fear they won’t get what they want.

Little moments can have a feeling and a texture that is very real.

I should say, a piece of advice that was given to me very early on by the principle of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) which is where I went. When he auditioned me, he said, "Your speech, monologue, is fine. It's good. Yeah, I think you have ability but you're making it happen. Don't make it happen, let it happen." And that's a sort of subtle shift I think, as an actor.

The sets were fantastic. The Harry Potter sets are brilliant. You do get transported for a second.

There's a lot of people who feel there's a tabloid journalist who had it coming.

There is a tension in relationships between wanting to return to the womb, but also wanting to be free. Because sometimes the woman's attentions can be overly maternal, and you want to go, 'Ahhhh!'

News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising - not just at an executive level, but on the floor, in the warehouse. A man is packing a box of oral rehydration tablets; maternity kits are being prepared; education kits are being packed. And somewhere, tomorrow, those boxes will be unpacked and a child with life-threatening diarrhoea will be saved, a baby will be born in more hygienic circumstances, a girl will receive her first exercise book and her first pencil.

I was only interested in my scene, and I had to go through thousands and thousands of other scenes. I got my scene and I read it many, many, many, many, many times. That was my research.

As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.

I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things.

In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system.

Having gone through editing process, I can see that in actor's faces there's point where they're not managing their performance and that's, I think, the best place to be. You've done the homework, you've learned the lines, at that point you just sort of let it out.

When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.

Unicef wants to encourage a sense of stability for a child.