218 Quotes by Colin Firth

It didn’t have to be a newfound respect for the craft, I knew that it’s notoriously difficult and frightens a lot of people off. I don’t think anyone knows quite who to attribute it to, but the dying actor who says: “dying is easy, comedy is hard.” I hear it.

It’s entirely to do with personality, I think. There are good directors who talk a lot, bad directors who talk a lot, and good directors who don’t say much and vice-versa. It just depends on whether people respond to that personality and whether people have a willingness to do something for them.

It’s whether they have a vision and whether they’re able to communicate it. The best director is just someone who gets over-excited about doing it – they don’t even have to know much about camera or acting.

People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It’s not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.

If you’re playing someone who’s impeded by fear, or shyness, or has whatever dysfunction your character might have, you have to achieve the dysfunction first, imaginatively, in order to play someone who is trying to negotiate their way out of it.

I do also think it eludes genre a bit – not in any groundbreaking way but you can’t quite call it a comedy and you can’t quite call it a romantic anything. It’s not quite a drama either really. But it has elements of all those things.

My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I’ve sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there’s no virtue in that; it’s the way one is raised.

I think the dictator director is based upon stories from the past. I don’t think anyone would put up with it now. There are a lot of people on a film set with egos. So, to be completely authoritarian, you’d probably have to have a reputation like Kurosowa or somebody to get away with it.

I absolutely don’t care about my looks and I’m so used to them that I wouldn’t change a thing. I would end up missing my defects.