Stanley Tucci Quotations

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

I'm not interested in wasting money on a project.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Even The Impostors, as silly as it is, is a very intimate film, in a way.

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.

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

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

I like to see how I can do it for less money.

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

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

I was always attracted to the past as a kid.

I would rather just do the things I want to do.

I write in the mornings. During my down time.

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

So I went to SUNY. at Purchase, studied acting at the conservatory. Did some plays, later TV. Nothing unusual.

He was capable of tremendous generosity, and of real cruelty,

He does things comically that most people can't do. It's very hard to do what he does. He makes it seem effortless.

When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.

You gotta make the movie you want to make.

I've directed a film set in the '50s.

Sometimes it's difficult directing yourself on film because you can't quite separate yourself from the subject.

It's more interesting because you get to research the history of the period, and all the different aesthetic elements that make a film, particularly this film, so stunning.

I had already made, like, 25 movies, playing a variety of roles, and it was a very frustrating time, ... I really couldn't get a job, and the only jobs I could get were, like, you know, these bit parts playing mobsters.

I hope that a younger generation will start to watch a movie like this and start to better understand a slower pace in a truly cinematic way.

But I'd shot enough independent films as an actor, one as a director. I knew that you have to be very specific when you're shooting a period picture.

The majority of directors I've worked with didn't know how to talk to actors.

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 hate movies that take a long time to shoot or directors that labor over every shot or do excessive amounts of coverage and excessive takes and don't keep things moving or constantly cutting.

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!"

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.

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

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.

The smaller films just take a longer period of time to build their fan base because people don't see them as soon as they come out in the theater. They see them, after a period of years.

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

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

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

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.

The action stuff takes a long time but when you're there and you're doing it and you go into that take and you run and everything is blowing up around you and you're diving onto something it's actually incredibly thrilling and you feel like a kid again. Like a kid, who used to play and pretend all those things would happen and now they're actually happening.

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.

The most I've ever done was twenty-something, but that's wasn't because I wanted to. I feel like to me it's usually somewhere between two and- no, it's very hard to say because it really depends up on the shot, you know? If it's a complicated master shot and you know that this is the only thing that you're doing for that scene, a complicated one-er, you're going to maybe end up doing a few more takes than you normally would. But I'm not a big believer in doing tons and tons and tons of takes.

I'm a control freak. Totally.

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.

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.

Sometimes you can't even find the director on a movie set. Sometimes you don't want to find the director on a movie set.

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

This is the funny thing about Skype. No one is really looking into the camera. People always looking down because they're looking at the image. You wish the camera was there in the center.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I was dissatisfied just being an actor.

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

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.

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.

I never go overbudget on my movies.

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

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'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.

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.

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.

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.