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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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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
Play
Wilde
Oscar
Oscars
Wit
Anybody
Interested
Interest
Else

More quotes by John Hurt

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I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.
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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.
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I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then, so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.
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Be true to what you want to say, or whatever style it is that you've chosen or genre you've chosen. Do it well! My criteria always has been that the piece must stand the chance of succeeding on the level it's intended to succeed on.
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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.
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I've done lots of films with first directors, so it's not unusual for me.
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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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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[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
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My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.
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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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If it's a low-brow bawdy comedy, it's got to stand the chance of succeeding as such. If it's an intellectual piece, a drama, and so forth. And of course, once you've determined the level of the piece, do it the best you know how. And then don't make concessions. To audiences, or to pursestrings, or whatever.
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Life is full of ironies and paradoxes.
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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Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.
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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We all have our limitations.
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I don't like no confusion.
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 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