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Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.

John Hurt

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John Hurt
Age: 77 †
Born: 1940
Born: January 22
Died: 2017
Died: January 27
Actor
Character Actor
Explorer
Film Actor
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Voice Actor
John Vincent Hurt
Sir John Vincent Hurt
Sir John Hurt
People
Pretending
Essence
Game
Games
Acting
Business
Whole

More quotes by John Hurt

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We shot ['Sailcloth'] five days down in Cornwall, and you couldn't have asked for a more beautiful place. It was a couple of tough days at sea, but when I say tough it was still enjoyable.
John Hurt
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I love working with Lars [von Trier]! I've worked with him three times. I did the narration of Dogville and Manderlay.
John Hurt
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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.
John Hurt
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The first film is everything you want to say and how you want to say it. Lots of directors will do that and do it really well, but the second film is not so easy.
John Hurt
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By the time I came to do the final ones [Harry Potter's film], I was working on something that was massively successful. There was a huge difference in indulgence and all sorts of stuff. A very big difference in peoples' attitudes. They were very pleased with themselves. In human terms, it was quite interesting to see the difference.
John Hurt
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When you're really working well with a director then you can be as outrageous as you like and so can he. And there's no worry about it.
John Hurt
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I don't like no confusion.
John Hurt
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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.
John Hurt
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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.
John Hurt
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[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.
John Hurt
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I never quite understand why we watch the news. There doesn't really seem much point watching somebody tell you what the news is when you could quite easily listen to it on the radio...
John Hurt
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We're all far too afraid of being so arrogant to say Either you can or you can't.
John Hurt
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My fathers a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.
John Hurt
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I've got plenty of train memories. I was sent to school when I was eight years old in 1948 in Kent. So I had to go through London in 1948, just after the war. Many ,many strange experiences.
John Hurt
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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.
John Hurt
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Films don't take as long as people think. 'Harry Potter,' people always used to say, 'Well, my God, do you ever get any time to yourself?' I think I did, in 'Harry Potter,' over a 12 year period I did five days. So it's not exactly exhausting.
John Hurt
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Anything which retains interest is optimistic. When the characters become disinterested, it's pessimistic. Does that make sense?
John Hurt
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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.
John Hurt
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My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...
John Hurt
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[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.
John Hurt