Stanley Tucci Quotes

As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.

I'm a control freak. Totally.

A dream that you don't fight for can haunt you for the rest of your life.

Those moments in between the moments, those are the most interesting. What's unspoken, the way we talk around things, the way our actions are inconsistent with what we're feeling, how anger and affection manifest themselves in strange ways at inappropriate times.

As soon as the actor steps into the role, you probably can cut 50% of the lines because there's a person there now. And what a person does with their eyes, with their mouth, with their hands, the way they walk into a room, you can probably cut half the scene.

The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.

Ripe bananas are the mark of a good produce section. A good produce section is the mark of a superior grocery store. A superior grocery store is the mark of a good man.

Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it.

The thing is, I'm a very practical filmmaker.

Sometimes we all make relationships more complicated than they necessarily have to be.

I write in the mornings. During my down time.

People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.

I have consciously not taken the role of a gangster, which has been offered to me far too many times.

I didn't know you had to change diapers so often. I couldn't believe it - we must change them 10 times a day - each. So that's 20 diapers a piece a day.

I mean, Scorsese's a genius, and that's one way of shooting.

As a director you have to be careful you don't over-design the film. You have to be careful that the period aspect does not take over.

I'm actually one who will encourage directors to cut my lines.

But usually I'll wake up and start writing about nine o'clock. I'll probably write for about three hours, and I'll do that over the next month and a half.

I don't like to move the camera that much anyway.

It's different if you're a painter. You can hidethe ones that don't work. You can't do that with movies. They tellthe story of who you are at the time, and that's the wonderful thingabout it.

[Hollywood] studios are handing out money to make independent films now, but they all want the same thing. They want the style and the deadpan delivery of RESERVOIR DOGS or FARGO and so they imitate those movies. They want PULP FICTION, but they get it all wrong! They get the detachment, but that's it. And then it's all about style, and in the end what do you learn about the characters? Nothing. You learn you wasted two hours.

I'm pretty much a character-driven film director and my movies are smaller. I don't do a lot of coverage. I use lots of master shots.

If you find that thing you love, it doesn't necessarily matter whether you do it well or not-you just need to do it.

As a film director I like to have the actors create their own close-ups. It's an older style of filmmaking.

I think everybody has a little bit of an asshole inside of them.

You have to be serious about what you do but you mustn't take yourself seriously. That way you'll be happier and ultimately you'll be more successful. You'll be better at what you do.

Every character, no matter who you play, at times is pretending to be somebody else. People have a public face and a private face.

I was always attracted to the past as a kid.

I think it's important to have a good sense of humor and joke around with your kids. That's what I do a lot.

If you feel safe then you can go wherever you want to go as an actor.

There is a joke that I use all the time. I say it to my kids. I used to say it to my wife. She'd be talking to me about something very serious and then I would just look at her and go "Where are you from originally?" And she would go "Humphhh! C'mon. That's terrible!"

What's great is when you're working with somebody with whom you have a connection, it's exciting because there's a shorthand and you trust each other and you have a good time together on the set and so you can go a little farther than you might normally because you're with somebody that you trust.

I was dissatisfied just being an actor.

Early in my career, people wanted to pigeonhole me as the bad guy because I'm of Italian-American descent, which they often were when I started out. You have to fight against it. One of the things that helps is the ability to do comedy.

I'd read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell's stuff for a long time.

Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.

I never go overbudget on my movies.

I've always considered myself an actor first and foremost.

I'm not saying they won't be bigger projects someday.

I've been playing the father of teenagers for years. People always thought that I was 40 when I was 26. Once you lose your hair, they're like "Oh! He's really old now."

I like to use all of myself, and acting wasn't doing that.

I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid.

I love directing - it's always so involving, so challenging.

Every role is approached in exactly the same way, you have to make it believable and that's all. Acting is really serious, like, pretending really hard.

3D movie is tedious, its tedious for everybody, it's hard for the crew, it's hard for the actors. It adds more time. It's more technically complicated, so that just adds more time and takes a little more time away from he acting and that's kind of frustrating but to say "I'll never do 3D again" that doesn't make any sense.

Whatever the best scripts are and you just want to play roles that you can really sink your teeth into. That's always the goal no matter if it's a good guy or a bad guy, or a comedy, or a drama. It doesn't matter, you just want something that's substantial you can sink your teeth into and that you haven't done before, something that's really going to challenge you.

So yes, I hope to act in other people's movies, big and small, because that's how I make my living, really.

And I love doing my own projects; that's what I've always wanted to do.

I'm interested in how people shoot because I have a very specific way of shooting and I'm fascinated by the way other people shoot films, particularly if they're smart and talented.