Ralph Fiennes Quotes

I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.

There is a humanitarian impulse that one aspires to and there are days when one doesn't do it very well.

There are those moments when you shake someone's hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment.

When you get into the edit you'll understand what making a film is. You'll see all the things you missed and all the possibilities you have from what you shot.

The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can't eat.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

You feel yourself working to show something. I've learned to distrust that feeling.

Success is all about being able to extend love to people. The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it.

Awards are like applause, and every actor likes to hear applause.

I feel there's so much still to learn about acting. But there is some magic in the capturing of performance and in the process of editing a performance. The psychology of human beings and what's coming through the face... that fascinates me.

Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film of this scale. Our producer decided that for the film to really work it had to be in Kenya.

In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.

I don't feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they're extremely well informed.

I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.

You dread that there will be real problems during filming.

I have grown up loving Shakespeare.

I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about and offer up. It would be odd not to have ideas about something.

It's great to be on a set where there's time and there's focus and there's also a kind of adrenaline thrill on a set where people are saying: "We have to get this shot, we've have to go, we've got to move on!"

...the world is a giant community now. This excuse of distance, time, doesn't work...We're all so connected. We can't spend every second of our lives worrying about another family miles away but we somehow have to factor it in where we can.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.

Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.

I don't feel I'm playing villains all the time.

I couldn't get as big as a bodybuilder. I tried to put on as much weight in the right places as I could. My weightlifting was impressive for me, but not for some of the guys I see down at the gym.

Success.. is all about being able to extend love to people... not in a big, capital letter sense but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word.

I went out to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I thought was very beautiful, but there were a lot of people there.

I've never felt fallow in the sense that there's been no work.

It [the scene] can be something given to you and you go, "Ah this is a good idea, I can work with this." Sometimes it cuts right across your instinct and that's when I might resist. Even if the director might be insistent, I think it's very important to say, "Look, I'm not feeling this. I'll try to make it work but I got to let you know."

If I had a gun to my head and I had to choose between theater and film I'd choose theater.

I respond to a part just intuitively when I read a script.

I loved doing Harry Potter. I had a great time on that. And I think it's good to have a mix. I think you're learning all the time.

I'm more relaxed about how the editing process will create a performance and that, in a way, gives me a sense of freedom.

I think I feel more like you're an actor for hire and you take the jobs you want to take, obviously, and some pay well and some don't pay well at all but you go on a gut feeling and it's all a big adventure.

He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.

You have to just dive over the edge. You haven't got time to mess about.

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

I spent the past week here in India getting a sense of the reality of HIV and AIDS in people's lives. Fathers and mothers are dying, leaving children with no support. Stigma and discrimination is ruining the family lives. There is an urgent need for education, information, and increased awareness of HIV and AIDS. The response needs to be now. We cannot afford to become fatigued.

I'm interested in the spirits of people. In the theatre, there's the acting part of acting - and I'm not saying that can't be great - and there's the essence. To explore that essence, you need a key, a look, a gesture, an insight that unlocks the person's soul.

Voldemort? That might be real.

We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter... [Language] is being eroded -- it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.

One of the things that binds us as a family is a shared sense of humor.

In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don't over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible.