Quotes By Ralph Fiennes

I'm not very good at being domesticated. I've tried. The domestic life I find claustrophobic - the rituals and habits and patterns.

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.

When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.

I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.

I like to keep fit, but I never lift very heavy weights.

I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.

You're meant to be playing the distillation of evil, which can be anything.

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.

I can't go and shoot people in the back of the head because It's a kids' movie, which is actually quite a good test because you haven't got the overt threat of a knife in the face.

I don't feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they're extremely well informed.

When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.

The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can't eat.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

I veer away from trying to understand why I act. I just know I need to do it.

I respond to a part just intuitively when I read a script.

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.

Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film.

I tried to play rugby but was never very good.

I'm sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.

One of the things that binds us as a family is a shared sense of humor.

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.

When I first filmed things, they were always slightly awkward.

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.

You dread that there will be real problems during filming.

I don't feel I'm playing villains all the time.

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.

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.

You feel yourself working to show something. I've learned to distrust that feeling.

Little moments can have a feeling and a texture that is very real.