Words matter. These are the best Peter Mullan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The films that I really enjoy now are films that are made by, for wont of a better word, mavericks.
I’m not a huge kind of visual director. For me, it’s all about the acting. There’s no greater buzz than working with actors and seeing what they can do and how much they can improve on what you’d written. That will always be on the top of my list. It’s a real privilege to see it live before anyone else sees it.
A lot of actors aren’t particularly good directors. And they’re not particularly good with other actors. That’s kind of a fallacy.
A script is utterly useless in and of itself; it’s only of any worth the minute your actors, your designers, your directors come into being.
I don’t like the way some actors, when playing a nasty character, will try to grab hold of something good about them.
Life is much weirder than fiction; nothing’s more absurd.
Just in relation to women, it’s not that huge an imaginative leap to see the connection between the Taliban and the Catholic Church.
I know virtually no one of my age who can remember a hug, or a smile from their father, or a ‘Let’s go play football.’
If you are the kind of guy who draws in 100 million people to see his film, you’ve got every right to be paid accordingly, but I qualify as a character actor. I don’t put a bum on a seat.
Part of the reason why so many actors lose the plot when they go over to America is that they become part of an industry, so that’s why they don’t want to play weak, bad or vulnerable guys – because that’s not sellable; that diminishes their profit margin.
What point is there to all the wealth and power that America may have if they can’t look after its own?
I hate it when something is set in 1967 and every piece of furniture was made in 1967. No! If it’s set in 1967, people have furniture given to them by their grandmother, which she bought in 1932!
In Scotland, we’re a colony in more ways than one. So when directors come up to work, there’s a very particular way they want Scotland to look like and to behave like.
When things are really painful, I turn it into comedy.
Truth is I don’t think God on a daily basis. I think politics, science.
I was on the set of ‘Braveheart’ and my mate says to me, ‘Do you think this film will be any good?’ And I really meant this, too, I told him ‘Let me put it this way – It won’t win any awards.’ Cut to: five Oscars.
No hard guy’s not scared when another hard guy’s knife is coming at you. You’re scared, obviously, but you’ve to act less scared than he is. It’s who is going to act less scared.
In bringing the subject of religious oppression to a wider audience, I didn’t just want to kick the Catholic Church but to poke a finger in the throat of theocracy and to let it be known that people shouldn’t tolerate this anymore.
It’s not so much that I want to direct but that I have to. When I write something it terrifies me that if I give it to someone else and it doesn’t turn out as it could have done, I’d feel as if I’d orphaned my baby.
There’s no such thing as an actor giving positive criticism to a director. The minute you say ‘Don’t you think it would look nicer…’, that director’s going to hate your guts. Particularly if it’s a good idea.
The Vatican is like a huge kind of magician’s club. The more you look into it the more awful it becomes. And they’re laughing at us. That’s when I get angry.
I love acting. It’s the one job I know of where you can go in, go through complete catharsis – emotionally, physically sometimes and mentally – and at the end of the day say, ‘See you in the pub, guys.’
There are some people who walk into a room and they oxygenate it, by their very being there’s fresh air. Then there are those who come in with the smell of death and they suck the life out.
I guess I’m part of the art house, but we really have to shake up our ideas, because we’re kind of self-parodying ourselves. We go places commercial cinema doesn’t go, but sometimes it’s to our own detriment.
The Vatican has tried to condemn ‘The Magdalene Sisters’ as a pack of lies and that I’ve made it all up – I wish I was that good a dramatist – and in terms of public relations, that was the daftest thing they ever did.
