Words matter. These are the best Lance Henriksen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I do a horror or a fantasy film it all boils down to something in the script that surprises me. It could be a big thing or a small moment. If it’s there I’ll do it.
Charles Bean is a brilliant director. I come in with an idea and try to do it, but I fall on my face. And then, he says, ‘Wait a minute, there was a little moment in there. Let’s try that moment and expand in that direction.’
You can’t do every movie – although I do a lot of them – and the thing I’m longing to do is… it’s not that I think I’m funny… but I long to do a situation comedy.
What’s frustrating to me is when, on a low-budget movie, people don’t take chances. A big-budget movie, that script’s your bible; nobody’s going to risk going off the page. But when you’re doing a very low-budget film, why not take some chances, intellectually, artistically?
One of my favorites of all time was with Jim Jarmusch, called ‘Dead Man.’ I was in that with Johnny Depp. I ride really well, and I shoot a gun really well. I love the genre. Once I did Westerns, I was hooked.
I have never gauged myself against anyone else.
In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.
Growing up, I think I always had a sense of art: a sense that there was poetry in the world. I didn’t know where I was going to find it. I didn’t know where I was going to fit in, that was for sure. But I kept moving forward. There wasn’t a future in anything other than movement.
My feeling is, I do a lot of low-budget films. I don’t do low-budget acting. I have no interest in just goofballing my way through, thinking, ‘Ah, no one’s ever going to see this anyway.’
You do your work as fully as you can, and the ones who hear the sound join in.
I liked ‘Scream of the Banshee’ because it was a real challenge. I thought, ‘How am I going to pull off this character?’ But, I also thought, ‘Oh, man, I’m going to go for it.’ He’s got all the defects of character that an actor loves to play. So, I had a really great time.
If you’re not acting, you’re not an actor.
The thing I hate most in acting is asking permission to do things. What you really want to do is say, ‘This is my need; this is what’s going to get me further; this is what’s going to be alive. I don’t ever say, ‘Do you mind if…?’ I just come in and do it.
I don’t think in words; I think in pictures, in images.
As a kid, there was a painting of ‘Appeal to the Great Spirit’ that I would see when I would get oatmeal bowls out of the cupboard. This painting, it was so real to me that it frightened me.
I really like playing good guys, of course. Although, people make mistakes in their lives, and you could say that the mistakes make us who we are, by how we respond to them. I just don’t want to play boring good guys, but I don’t have that problem, anyway.
Because I’ve done a lot of theater, I know what power is and how megalomaniacs are, since I’ve certainly played some.
You know something, if you’re not acting, you’re not an actor – you’ve gotta work. No way around it.
Corporate nationalism to me is a little bit like what would have happened if Hitler had won. It’s scary stuff. It’s totalitarianism in a different from, under a different flavour.
I always wanted to be an actor, even when I was a little kid. When I used to run away from home, I’d go to movies and sit all night watching Kirk Douglas. When I was 16, I tried getting into the Actors Studio, and they told me to get lost. I said ‘I’ll come back when I’m a man,’ and I came back when I was 30.
