I was shocked the first time the paps got me in America - when a video camera is put in your face and you're asked questions and 15 people are walking backwards taking your picture. I was coming out of a pizza shop and had my daughter with me.
Before I became an actor, I was a visual artist, and I've always hankered for the storytelling behind the camera.
Practicing going over scenes and in front of the camera just to see how that feels, and then ultimately just finding a way to expose yourself to people. That's what I did.
Working in front of the camera keeps me alive.
She claimed she loved the camera, its warmth, its familiarity. She responded to its naked glare, its slavish attention to every expression of her face and body, with the kind of immediacy a trusted lover could expect.
When you're working in front of the camera, there are always things that occur to you after the director has said 'Cut.' I could probably, if I sat down and thought about it, come up with instances where I wished I had made this particular choice or that particular choice.
The really cool challenge of '24' was learning on camera how to be a dramatic actress. The biggest difficulty was the industry side of things. I was very lucky that I had Joel Surnow, one of the creators of '24,' in my corner. Early on, the Fox executives couldn't believe that I was on the show.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.
I was a very imaginative and theatrical child and wasn't afraid of being in front of a camera.
I feel that working with the camera and editing it is actually my strong suit.
When I was fifteen years old, my dad won a video camera in a corporate golf tournament. I snatched it from his closet and began filming skateboard videos with my friends.
For an actress there is no greater gift than having a camera in front of you, listening to the most beautiful music in the world and just being looked at!
Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.
Making 'The Avengers' was very important to me, but it was also extremely arduous. I missed my friends and I missed my home, so I decided to throw them all on camera, which is the only way I seem to know to relate to people.
Years ago - in the 70s, for about a decade - I carried a camera every place I went. And I shot a lot of pictures that were still life and landscape, using available light.
Being an actor in TV or movies is different. A film or TV actor, if put in theatre, won't know certain dimensions, while a theatre actor won't know certain things when he comes before the camera. So I think a film actor can learn emoting from this theatre counterpart, while the theatre actor can learn about camera techniques from the film actor.
Life came in and put me in front of the camera before I could really make a decision, but I think I probably would have gravitated to film.
We were using a hand-held camera to film the scene when Morse collapses. The camera wouldn't start. Three times they said action and it still wouldn't work. To this day, they still don't know what was wrong.
I still enjoy acting. I love the moment in front of the camera, but it's all the other moments that I don't enjoy. The 'business' aspect of it, the gossip. I really dislike about 99% of what I do, but I like that 1% when I'm on camera.
Some people are really nice about it. I get Saudi princes and famous people stopping me in L.A. and saying, 'You're Stifler's mom. Can I take a picture with you?' But then you get people like her putting their camera in your face without asking. They think they can do whatever they like.
There's a certain way people are used to seeing nude women, and that's in a submissive, coy pose, not looking at the camera. And in this poster, I'm looking dead into the camera with no expression on my face. I think it freaks a lot of people out.
Each new film is like a trial. Before I step in front of the camera, I do not know whether I am going to fall or whether I am going to fly - and that is exactly the way I want it to stay.
Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like.
There was a sense of all the things that go on on the street, particularly in New York, that you are just completely unaware of, that that conversation could be happening at any time. I loved the instability of the camera. It's just an unstable world.
Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I'd done even years ago doing people. I couldn't get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.
People ask me to smile for the camera, but somehow it always comes out gloomy.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
That first year at Universal was a big blur and, naturally, I thought they were wasting me. I didn't realize at the time that I was learning my craft and acting more easily in front of the camera.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
In Hitchcock's eyes the movement was dramatic, not the acting. When he wanted the audience to be moved, he moved the camera. He was a subtle human being, and he was also the best director I have ever worked with.
In front of the camera I look and I see visually what I've created.
It's taken me 15 years to step behind a camera and make something everyone agrees looks like a movie.
At least when you're acting you can be someone. In front of the camera you have to be yourself. And who am I?
The second I walk onto the set and I know that there's a camera and I know that there's a David Twohy behind that camera, there is zero pressure. There is just me jumping into a pool called 'Riddick.' It's the most free I am. It's like channeling something.
I appreciate subtlety. I have never enjoyed a kiss in front of the camera. There's nothing to it except not getting your lipstick smeared.
When I was little, I didn't know you got paid for acting. My parents put the money in the bank for me, but I just thought it was this fun thing that I was so excited to do. You got to be on the set and get a little bit of makeup and be on camera.
