Top 50 Udo Kier Quotes

I’m a totally desert person.

I like special directors, and I’ve collected a few.

If I hadn’t been an actor, I’d be a gardener.

I never wanted to be an actor. I just wanted to learn languages and travel and see the world.

I like digital films.

I want to have fun. Big Hollywood films can be fun, but you know it’s an industry, and if you don’t function, they send you home.

I’ve done more than 65 films. I don’t count them anymore. The first 10 you count and then you stop.

Sometimes, you can also have a big impact in a film just by doing something unexpected.

I have a lot of palm trees, because they say to me holidays and ocean. I grew up very poor and I had an aunt who would go on holiday and send me postcards of palm trees and I would pin them to the wall, so I’ve gone from that fantasy to reality.

I don’t wear gloves when I work in the garden.

I tried all my life to be a normal person.

I have a ranch and when I sit there and see a little lizard and birds, I really love what I see and I’m love with nature.

I always wanted to make music but I cannot play any instrument.

I’m a very quiet person actually.

I like to work with directors who write their own stories.

If you have a smaller role, but if you work with a great director, they make it unforgettable.

I’m coming from an artistic background, from Europe, making films with Lars Van Trier like ‘Breaking the Waves,’ ‘Dancer in the Dark,’ all his films, ‘The Kingdom.’ But I like both, I like the totally artificial, commercial films where the actor has five or six bodyguards, I like that.

When I’m depressed and the weather is bad I look up my page on IMDb and I have my coffee and feel better. There are even films on there I don’t know about!

I like Palm Springs because of the sunshine. It’s a little city surrounded by mountains.

If you make horror movies, you always have to think what’s photogenic and what’s not.

I made films, like ‘Shadow of the Vampire,’ and I did not like the work I did on it and then Willem Dafoe was nominated for the Oscar. I made films like ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’ with Martin Landau. I thought I would get nominated and it flopped. You never know.

I’m an aesthetic person who loves beauty.

I love the smell of the Earth. I’m a good cook my friends say. I love cooking for my friends. So I’m totally the opposite of being evil. I think only if you’re a good person can you be very evil onscreen.

I have few friends. I can count them on one hand. I go by myself to the cleaners and the supermarket and I live alone with my dogs.

I’m very lucky to say that I worked with a lot of directors who cannot make a bad film. Like when Wim Wenders, they cannot make a bad film. They can make a film people don’t like, or it’s the wrong moment.

The first day of shooting came, and of course I was nervous. I would lie if I said I wasn’t impressed. I mean, Lars von Trier hiring me to be the king in ‘Medea’… Lars said, ‘Stop! Stop!’ And I was so nervous, I turned around and said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘… Just be a tired king.’

Audition is the worst thing. It’s like cleaning furniture in a department store.

I’m very laid-back, and I meet people just by accident – never through agencies or anything like that. I met Paul Morrissey, who directed me in ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein,’ on a plane from Rome to Munich. He asked for my telephone number and wrote it in his passport.

Rob Zombie’s very intellectual-crazy, and I like people like that. No stupid craziness.

Anybody can act.

It is fun to play evil parts… especially vampires.

I mean, if you are director like Lars Von Trier who is able to get actors on a table like Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, James Caan, Nicole Kidman, Chloe Sevigny, Stellan Skarsgard, Udo Kier, all in the self-service situation in the same room, the same trailer, no money, then you must have something that everybody accepts.

In America as a foreign actor it’s very difficult to get into main roles.

In Hollywood, they make movies like they make washing machines. It’s a business. In Europe, the films are considered art. No producer would ever tell a director where to cut a film or how to re-write the script. I love Hollywood, but all of the time I have to go back to Europe.

When I have a part that isn’t the leading part, I want to act in a way that people remember. Otherwise, what is the point?

I was brought up in Germany, born in 1944, and there was nothing to eat.

Nobody of us has ever seen ourselves! We see a reflection in the mirror.

People often say to me, especially people from the press: ‘Oh, you are so evil.’ But I’m a gardener. I rescue animals in Palm Springs where I live.

When you get older time moves faster – much faster.

In my real life I’m a very normal person.

There are many things, as an actor, where you find that a production just wants you for your name. I am not a big, big, big name, but maybe they can sell the movie if I am in it. This I don’t like.

Warhol took outcasts and made them into stars. There will never be another artist like him.

I like the vampire films because of the fantasy of it.

My great joy these days is giving palm trees water. Simple as that.

I like to have the newest thing. I like the Internet, they know more about me than I do, which is amazing.

Artistically I like to do short-term things. Like I do a lot of commercials, I have the Miller commercial out where I play the Devil in Hell, where Hell is frozen.

I don’t mind playing Nazis, but I’ll only play them in comedies. I wouldn’t play a serious Nazi.

Good movies are difficult to make, and good trash is even harder to make.

It’s logical when you become known to the industry with ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein’ that they typecast you and want you in their horror movies. That’s how I got ‘Blade,’ of course, because they were fans.

I’ve been in over a hundred films so I know what producers are like.