Kevin Spacey Quotes
Actor
If you're watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you're not watching it in a theatre? If you watch a TV show on your iPad, is it no longer a TV show? The device and the length are irrelevant; the labels are useless, except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers, who use these labels to conduct business deals.
No matter how good you might be in a movie, you'll never be any better. But in a play, I can be better next Tuesday. That's the thrill of it.
If you're lucky enough to do well, it's your responsibility to send the elevator back down.
People have different reasons for the way they live their lives. You cannot put everyone's reasons in the same box.
Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they'll more likely pay for it rather than steal it. Well, some will still steal it, but I think we can take a bite out of piracy.
If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart; if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!
I feel it's a responsibility for anyone who breaks through a certain ceiling... to send the elevator back down and give others a helpful lift.
I am now a commander of the British Empire.
We're all victims of our own hubris at times.
Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.
If you look back through history in the United States, there have been very few landslide elections. Half the country always voted for someone else.
Sometimes the person who is the most logical is the person whom we call insane.
I mean we all played as kids. You play games, you take on different characters, you imitate; the fun and the love of play has never left me.
I'm supposed to convince you, for two hours, that I'm somebody else. Now if you know everything about my life, if you think you've got me figured out and you think you know all my dark secrets, how am I ever going to convince you that I'm somebody else?
You have to always be ready, always be alive, and always be willing to move in a new direction.
Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of 'House of Cards' at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they've been doing on 'House of Cards' and lots of other shows, we should let them binge.
People don't tend to hassle me because when I've got a hat on, I look like a banker. I'm just a plain guy.
To look in the eyes of audiences and see the kind of naughty glee that they got with being on the inside, the audience becomes your co-conspirators.
Essentially, your voice is an instrument; it's a muscle, and you have to treat it like a muscle, and so you have to work it.
I've taken the experiences that I've had in the theatre and applied them to film and television and now games.
As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change.
Whether it's 'Veep' or 'Homeland' or 'The West Wing' - which is a more idealised version of democracy - people are fascinated by politics.
You learn every single day when you're running a company. You learn as you go.
I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid.
What's my favourite book? It changes all the time.
The Old Vic has always been first and foremost an actors' theatre, a home for great talent and memorable performances.
I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman.
I liked it because it was such a dangerous script and showed just what human beings are capable of. Here was a movie in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, who always win in every movie they ever do, simply don't win. I felt that was outrageous for a commercial movie.
It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way.
I don't live a lie. You have to understand that people who choose not to discuss their personal lives are not living a lie. That is a presumption that people jump to.
My mother always, always, always thought that I was going to be famous. Thought that I was going to win Oscars. In fact, I believe I accepted the Oscar as a ketchup bottle many a time in front of my mother in the kitchen. 'I'd like to thank the Academy,' I said with a ketchup bottle.
Life's all about perceptions.
The process of doing a play is an organic one, and the process of doing a film is totally inorganic.
Some politicians that I've seen have been brilliant with the public. They almost speak with the skill of an actor.
I have long been a supporter of The Prince's Trust, and so when American Express asked me to launch 'Amex Be Inspired' and help young people build their confidence and fulfil their potential, I was delighted to get involved.
Am I now supposed to go on Oprah and cry and tell you my deepest, darkest secrets because you want to know?
Both 'Consenting Adults' and 'Glengarry Glen Ross' revolve around the economic stresses of the '90s. They are about what people do when they're pushed against that wall, and how they're manipulated. They are both morality tales, though in very different genres.
President Obama will go down as having passed some of the most historic bills in the history of this country.
The fact is that HBO is doing the kind of films and the kind of stories that the movie industry used to do. You look at a lot of the specialty sections of studios that have gone under... and there's no doubt in my mind why filmmakers and screenwriters and actors are ending up at a place like HBO. They do it better than anybody.
If we don't reach out to make theatre affordable to the young generation, we will lose them all.
'The 24 Hour Plays' is a quite brilliant, exhilarating event for everyone concerned.
I love doing impressions.
I'm not revolted by Washington.
There's no doubt that some of the greatest films ever made have come from the theater. It's all a matter of finding a way to make the theater experience watchable on film.
There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, they've forgotten that, and they leave going, 'Wow - what an amazing play.'
I was not a studious kid, and I struggled to find things that would command my attention and engage my ideas and energies.
I accept the fact that some things don't go the way you hope.
I am so leading the life that I want and wanted and dreamed of as a kid. I'm trying very hard not to abuse it or take advantage of it.
I'm not someone who's led my life trying to get publicity; I'd rather do my work and go home.
Whether that's positive or not, people are talking about the Old Vic Theater again with passion and commitment and controversy and debate.
The audience wants control. They want freedom.
Maybe there are people who are gamers who haven't seen movies I have made, or the movies I have made have made no impression on them at all.
Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.
Partisan rancour and party politics and ideology have got in the way of compromise - and compromise is the only thing that has ever made politics successful.
It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.
As the years have gone on, I find one of the dangers of watching dailies... is you fall in love with moments.
It's the details and the human element that makes 'Recount' entertaining. Even though we know how the election ends, it plays like a thriller. It's also funny.
Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favourite actors have played Darrow... Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy.
I write a lot about my experiences and the people I meet. I've got a lot of material. But a book about me? It seems sort of odd.
It's always the big question in our lives if you have a lot of success. What do you do with it? Buy more houses, buy more cars, buy more stuff, be wealthy and distant and unengaged? Or do you take all that good fortune that has come towards you and spread the love, do something with it?
I'm attracted to things that are challenging and fun and interesting, and it certainly seems that audiences enjoy them as well.
Edward Norton and I have known each other awhile. I just think he's the real deal, supremely talented and smart. He's got a great sense of humor.
When you're just able to distill it down to the idea and the feeling that a character is experiencing in a scene, it can become very, very razor sharp and really clean and really efficient and simple. And sometimes it takes twenty-five years to learn how to be simple.
Cable TV has become where the best actors, writers and directors have gone to work because they are allowed to do character-driven stories.
Audiences grew to like this duality of feeling, where you're both championing a character and you're revolted by them.
Francis Underwood was entirely based on Richard III. When Michael Dobbs wrote 'House of Cards' in the original British series, Richard III is what he based the character on.
I felt that I shouldn't be an actor who just makes movie after movie in a quest for prestige and money.
You can almost hear people saying, 'We're going to make a movie about an election' and 'We're going to make a movie about a lobbyist.' You can hear the yawning start across the nation.
No one's personal life is in the public interest. It's gossip, bottom line. End of story.
Storytelling helps us understand each other, translate the issues of our times, and the tools of theater and film can be powerful in helping young people to develop communication/collaboration skills, let alone improving their own confidence.
No one should ever feel sorry for me. I've been treated very well for the most part.
I'm aware that, from the outside, this looks like I've got quite an ego.
I think that what is truly unfortunate is when an entire party makes a decision that they're going to block every single thing that a president wants to accomplish. It's very - it's very hard to get anything done in those circumstances.
And I certainly won't lay out areas of my life that I think are just private.
I open myself up every time I walk on screen and give you everything that I am. There are parts of me that are in every movie that I've done. That to me is what my job is.
There's nothing like standing in a place and wanting nothing so much as to change but simply not being able to.
Directing a film was something I was yearning to do. I always wanted to see if I had the capacity to be a good storyteller.
I'm lucky if I find one movie a year that's worth doing, and when I do find one, it usually only takes 20-30 days to shoot.
But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.
There are good people in the lobbying industry. Lobbyists can serve a very useful purpose.
For kids growing up now, there's no difference watching 'Avatar' on an iPad or watching YouTube on TV or watching 'Game of Thrones' on their computer. It's all content. It's just story.
Secondarily, I think films that are driven by music also terrify studios.
I'm not out there trying to get press for myself nor am I trying to convince anybody that I'm living any kind of a life. I'm actually trying to convince people: I don't want you to know what I'm living, because it's none of your business.
It's a great thriller or mystery, but on another level it's a film about the fact that, if you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what you're told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face.
My life will change, because I want it to change; and also because this is something I'm committed to doing and that I believe my life has been leading towards.
I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.
For me, coming to work every day has turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be.
I've been on sets where things weren't relaxed because someone was creating tension for no reason.
The next day I was in my school's production of All My Sons. This was the performance where I realized something was happening between me and the audience that I hadn't recognized before.
Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies.
I am different than some people would like me to be. I just don't buy into that the personal can be political.
The less you know about me, the easier it is to convince you that I am that character on screen.
When you study, as I did, every theatrical beginning in this country, none of them have been greeted well. The Royal Shakespeare Company was a disaster, Peter Hall was a disaster, Richard Eyre was a disaster, Trevor Nunn was always a disaster.
One of the tasks that any artistic director has is, you're trying to bring elements together that will work. The truth is that you could bring all the best talents in the world together and produce a big turkey.
The stigma that used to exist many years ago, that actors from film don't do television, seems to have disappeared. That camera doesn't know it's a TV camera... or even a streaming camera. It's just a camera.
I don't care about my personal acting career anymore. I'm done with it. After 10 years of making movies and doing better than I ever could have imagined, I sort of had to ask myself: 'What am I supposed to do with all of this success that I have had?'
Living in London has become incredible. I suppose it's easy to love where you live if you love what you're doing. But this is not just a visit: it's my home.
It's not easy to sustain a long career, and sometimes I don't even think about how long I've been doing it.
At the end of the day, people have to respect people's differences. I am different than some people would like me to be.
I've been intrigued by politics my whole life. And, yes, I am very close to the Clintons. I was a Hillary person until I was an Obama person. And she was a Hillary person, too, until she was an Obama one, evidently.