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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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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
Havens
Haven
Novel
Taken
Read
Springboard
Often
Springboards
Even
Script
Always
Scripts

More quotes by John Hurt

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The common misconception is that we create films for ourselves. And I really don't do it for myself. I get stopped in the street by people saying, Do you mind if I say this about your work? Do I mind? I'm delighted. I do it for you. It's not for me. It's my living, yes, sure.
John Hurt
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I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers! How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything!
John Hurt
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In anything really, it's finding the reality. You can't be 'real,' but you can create a reality. And that created reality is what the audience believes in. And that's essential. Because if the audience doesn't believe that, they're never going to trust you. And if they don't trust you, you can't lead them up the mountain.
John Hurt
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The British tradition, basically, is to go to the character. And the Hollywood tradition, shall we say, is basically to take the character to the performer.
John Hurt
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If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.
John Hurt
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I find myself more interested in producing. Not because I'm interested in the financial side of it, but just getting together the right elements to make a film, that side of production. I would not be good on the financial side. It would be a disaster from the beginning.
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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Anything which retains interest is optimistic. When the characters become disinterested, it's pessimistic. Does that make sense?
John Hurt
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The truth is rarely true and never simple.
John Hurt
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Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able - I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.
John Hurt
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I've spent a great deal of my life doing independent film, and that is partly because the subject matter interests me and partly because that is the basis of the film industry. That's where the film-makers come from, it's where they start and sometimes its where they should have stayed.
John Hurt
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I stopped asking a long time ago, why would you want me to play that? I'm an actor. That's what I do.
John Hurt
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Bong Joon-ho is enormously sensitive to performance. He knows what he needs to see and that's all he needs to shoot. He is so daring. We don't do that in the west. We shoot everything.
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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If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.
John Hurt
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We all have our limitations.
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 find it difficult to say, like which child do you prefer the most, and its a sort of surface choice. I've never known how to quite answer that one adequately.
John Hurt
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I left drama school and went straight into a 10-week film for which I was paid £75 I might say, which for 1962 was one heck of a lot of money.
John Hurt
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I think it would be very difficult to play somebody if they didn't think they had any virtues or redeeming characteristics.
John Hurt