Emily Mortimer Quotes
"This is not meant to have happened to me at all. I am a Sloane, from the Chilterns."
To be in the hands of an auteur like [
Andrei Tarkovsky], that would be just brilliant. But I don't know if those kind of films can ever be made any more. To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe . . . it just doesn't happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion. But that's part of the problem with politics and history and everything today, that people think there's a right and a wrong, a good and a bad . . . maybe there just isn't . . . .
"I have to say that, though it sounds so superficial, the accent really does help. I like having accents preparing for a part. It's a hard thing to do, to be given a script, and know that you've got to turn up on the first day of the shoot - generally without having had any rehearsal - and present a character. It's really baffling; it's incredibly hard to know how to begin, to approach it, other than just thinking about it. But how do you think about it? There's no guidebook."
Until Frankie [
Dear Frankie], I didn't realise that feeling part of a film was about staying up late, getting drunk, smoking and all that. And I wasn't doing it, obviously; or if I did, I felt racked with guilt about it. That was odd. It felt much more like a job of work.
It doesn't feel like that. The big producers still want
Kate Winslet and
Kate Beckinsale, I suppose. - on whether she has made it into mainstream Hollywood
I want any excuse to come home. My dad is not a spring chicken any more. If anyone says, go buy a postage stamp in London, I'll go and do it.
"...acting was something I pretended I didn't want to do as I was growing up."
"...you can imagine, or think you can imagine, how to play almost anything - a drug addict, a bank robber, a killer - but the imagination doesn't prepare you for being a mother and those particular feelings."
"I wasn't prepared for the inexplicable, overwhelming feeling of love and protection, or how hard it would be to have to leave this little thing in the morning. The good thing about movies is that while you work hard for three or four months, you can have three months or so off afterward. Hopefully, it all works out. I'm trying to avoid, you know, guilt, even though before the child is born, you're already thinking you're doing things wrong. . . . Why do I think that will probably carry over until the day you die?" [on having her son]
"The preparation for a film is so ephemeral and hard -- you're lucky if you get a day of rehearsal or a chat with the director or actors on set. You really don't know what to do. Accents are very tangible, blessedly, and if you have to do one, it's a way of getting into character. I can read it through a few times and pretend I know what I'm doing!"
"But, yes, no matter how in character actresses are in a film, the moment they take off their clothes, you start wondering about them as a person. You start checking them out, in a way. It's a self-conscious moment for both the audience and for the actor and always, I think, slightly embarrassing."
