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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.

-Ralph Fiennes

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News Reports Can Overwhelm

Ralph Fiennes

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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.

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I Respond To A Part Just Intuitively When I Read A Script.

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.

I Guess I'd Love To Be Surprised By Something I Had Never Thought Of.

I Veer Away From Trying To Understand Why I Act. I Just Know I Need To Do It.

You're Meant To Be Playing The Distillation Of Evil, Which Can Be Anything.

The Film Depends On The Audience's Belief In This Relationship.

The Tensions Between Authority And The People Need To Be Heard, Especially When They Are Suffering And They Can't Eat.

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.

I Have Grown Up Loving Shakespeare.

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.

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.

Within The Process Of Filming, Unexpected Situations Occur.

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.

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.

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!'

There Is A Humanitarian Impulse That One Aspires To And There Are Days When One Doesn't Do It Very Well.

Awards Are Like Applause, And Every Actor Likes To Hear Applause.

In Shakespeare, Keep It Simple. Don't Over-inflect. The Speech Needs To Be Naturalistic And Simple And Accessible As Much As Possible.

Little Moments Can Have A Feeling And A Texture That Is Very Real.

Voldemort? That Might Be Real.

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.

Kenya Doesn't Have Much Of An Infrastructure For Hosting A Film.

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.

When I First Filmed Things, They Were Always Slightly Awkward.

I've Never Felt Fallow In The Sense That There's Been No Work.

You Dread That There Will Be Real Problems During Filming.

One Of The Things That Binds Us As A Family Is A Shared Sense Of Humor.

I Don't Plan A Career. That Doesn't Work For Me. I Just Have To Go With My Gut.

We'd All Like To Believe That Perhaps People Could Stop Killing Each Other.

Killing Each Other

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.

I'm Not Very Good At Being Domesticated. I've Tried. The Domestic Life I Find Claustrophobic - The Rituals And Habits And Patterns.

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.

I'm Sure Acting Is A Deeply Neurotic Thing To Do.

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.

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.

Ridicule Is Also A Weapon Against Forces Of Evil. Really Clever, Intelligent Ridicule.

If I Had A Gun To My Head And I Had To Choose Between Theater And Film I'd Choose Theater.

God Is Not Anything Human. God Is A Force, God Is Chaos, God Is Unknown. God Is Terror And Enlightenment At The Same Time.

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.

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.

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.

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'm More Relaxed About How The Editing Process Will Create A Performance And That, In A Way, Gives Me A Sense Of Freedom.

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.

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 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.

There's A Lot Of People Who Feel There's A Tabloid Journalist Who Had It Coming.

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I Like To Keep Fit, But I Never Lift Very Heavy Weights...

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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.

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Playing Yourself

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Gardeners Are Good At Nurturing, And They Have A Great Quality Of Patience, They're Tender. They Have To Be Persistent.

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Clear Direction

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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.

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...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.

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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.

People Fear They Won’t Get What They Want.

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When You Meet Women, Don't Pretend To Be Anything That You're Not.

I Don't Feel I'm Playing Villains All The Time.

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.

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.

We Are Now Living In A Jungle Where The Strong Eats The Weak,we Are Not Better Than The Arabs To Despise Them.

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.

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.

I Certainly Gained A Lot By Reading About Shanghai.

I Have A Lot Of Stuff I Want To Talk About And Offer Up. It Would Be Odd Not To Have Ideas About Something.

What Moves Me In Art Is How We Question Who We Are As People.

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.

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.

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."

You Have To Just Dive Over The Edge. You Haven't Got Time To Mess About.

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.

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