“I had hair down to my shoulders, a beard and mustache. I was crude and rude.”
― Martin Landau
“Great teachers are the ones who inspire you.”
― Martin Landau
“Life is a roller coaster. There are ups; there are downs. There are hills; there are valleys, peaks, and so on.”
― Martin Landau
“I don’t think villains think they are villains.”
― Martin Landau
“The idea of death is something that doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. But to bring something back – or vampires who never die – is a logical fantasy for a human being.”
― Martin Landau
“Bad actors try to cry, and good actors try not to. Bad actors try to laugh, and good actors try not to.”
― Martin Landau
“’Mission’ was a mind game. The ideal mission was getting in and getting out without anyone ever knowing we were there.”
― Martin Landau
“A good director makes a playground and allows you to play.”
― Martin Landau
“People think I’m a very serious actor, which I am. But you know, if you don’t have a sense of humor doing what I do, you perish.”
― Martin Landau
“Of course, I remember the Disney ‘Pinocchio.’ I was a little kid then… It was very instructive. Little boys who don’t behave wind up in lots of trouble.”
― Martin Landau
“I did 12 shows in 13 weeks at a summer theater in Maine where we were paid $35 a week. After taxes and $25 for room and board, I had enough money for a pack of cigarettes and a bowl of lobster bisque.”
― Martin Landau
“Bad guys don’t think they’re bad guys. Hitler probably thought he was a wonderful guy doing some wonderful and righteous work for Germany.”
― Martin Landau
“I did theatrical caricatures.”
― Martin Landau
“Everything that has happened to me is of value to me. As painful as certain things are, and have been, and were, there’s a use for those things in my life and in my work.”
― Martin Landau
“The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry.”
― Martin Landau
“I always treat each take as a rehearsal for the next take. That way you can find stuff and keep adding and playing until they tell me to stop.”
― Martin Landau
“I’ve always been interested in science fiction.”
― Martin Landau
“I’m very proud of Space 1999. Its success paved the way for other sci-fi shows to follow. My hope is that the DVD release will help it reach a new generation of fans.”
― Martin Landau
“You can have immediate regrets, but if you look at stuff and say, ‘Things happen for a reason’, there’s a fatalistic thing about it. Something will happen that will justify it in some way.”
― Martin Landau
“Harry Dean Stanton, Anjelica Huston – a lot of people have studied with me. It’s paying my dues.”
― Martin Landau
“It’s good to make people laugh.”
― Martin Landau
“The Italian tough guys, dey talk real deep like dis down in dere chests… while the Irish speak way high-ah, up here in their heads.”
― Martin Landau
“I hung around with Jason Robards, Richard Harris, Robert Shaw, Richard Burton. I knew not to match them for drinks.”
― Martin Landau
“I felt I knew Lugosi. Like him, I had worked for good directors and terrible directors.”
― Martin Landau
“I played a wide variety of roles.”
― Martin Landau
“’North by Northwest’ took two and a half to three months to film. When I look back, I realise I wasn’t intimidated by Hitchcock and Cary Grant. They were so accepting of me.”
― Martin Landau
“Subliminally, I had always wanted to act. Although I had only performed in a couple of plays, I was serious about it and was subsequently trained by people like Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan.”
― Martin Landau
“Jimmy Dean was my best friend.”
― Martin Landau
“I think we’ve all done things we’re not particularly fond of. Everybody goes through it and comes out the other end, and goes on with his life as if it didn’t happen.”
― Martin Landau
“The winners shouldn’t necessarily win, and the losers shouldn’t necessarily lose.”
― Martin Landau
“A film is not going to change the world. But if it can do that to individuals on an individual level, I think it’s a magnificent movie.”
― Martin Landau
“I’m certainly not going to play any of Matt Damon’s roles in the future. But he will eventually grow into mine, since he’ll be around for a long time.”
― Martin Landau
“Agents have enormous power that studios relinquished to them. The studios, when I first came to Hollywood, that’s where the power was.”
― Martin Landau
“Pictures are packaged and cast by agents.”
― Martin Landau
“I can take scripts directly to actors. Agents don’t like to hear that.”
― Martin Landau
“You have to be crazy to do theater.”
― Martin Landau
“They were like little palaces: all rococo or art deco. You’d walk in off those hot streets into a nice, air-cooled theater, and you’d spend all day watching Cagney or Jimmy Stewart. It cost all of 17 cents.”
― Martin Landau
“The modern cineplexes are mundane, dull boxes. But ‘The Majestic’ pays tribute to the movie palaces that made people feel like royalty. It honors a time when pictures helped Americans get through grim periods like the blacklist and the war.”
― Martin Landau
“I don’t know anybody who’s any good who isn’t nuts.”
― Martin Landau
“I was being groomed to be the theatrical caricaturist. And I know if I got that job, I’d never quit. So I quit. I knew I wanted to go into the theater… I wanted to act.”
― Martin Landau
“I trained as an actor with Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and Harold Clurman, and those guys set a very high bar.”
― Martin Landau
“The average scene in a film, you have to shoot it 15, 20 times. That means you got to laugh or cry 15, 20 times.”
― Martin Landau
“How a character hides his feelings tells us something about him.”
― Martin Landau
“I was very thin, exceedingly thin. If you look at ‘North By Northwest,’ you’ll get a clue.”
― Martin Landau
“I’m not speaking, you know, egocentrically at all, but I do have a very wide range.”
― Martin Landau
“I could play a lot of things. And it’s hard for people and logically hard and understandably hard for people to think of me for certain roles.”
― Martin Landau
“An actor knows much more about a character than the character knows about himself.”
― Martin Landau
“In film, there are always things that could conceivably create artificiality in any performance.”
― Martin Landau
“Dialogue is what a character’s willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren’t willing to share is what I do for a living.”
― Martin Landau
“People do not necessarily reveal what is going on – only bad actors do.”
― Martin Landau
“My mantra is ‘stay perpendicular.’ Horizontal is not as good.”
― Martin Landau
“I run the ‘Actors Studio’ on the West Cost. I’m artistic director of that.”
― Martin Landau
“I’ve turned down a lot of roles. Some of them made stars out of the people. I have no regrets.”
― Martin Landau
“Sergio Leone came to see me when I was doing ‘Mission Impossible.’ He wanted me to do ‘A Fistful of Dollars.’ I turned him down. I didn’t want to get stuck as a stoic Western movie star.”
― Martin Landau
“I always believed that all it would take was a decent role. I felt like a pinch hitter with a leaden bat: that if I got a chance, I could hit a home run.”
― Martin Landau
“Nobody knew me. They just knew that I was the guy from ‘Mission: Impossible.’”
― Martin Landau
“I started teaching when I was in my 20s because Lee Strasberg asked me to, and he didn’t do that with a lot of people.”
― Martin Landau
“I’ve got two daughters, and it’s impossible for me to say one of them is a favorite.”
― Martin Landau
“The year I got into The Actors Studio, Steve McQueen and I were the only two accepted that whole year.”
― Martin Landau
“You can’t perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it’s part of your palette.”
― Martin Landau
“No one tries to cry. You try not to cry. No one tries to laugh. You try not to laugh.”
― Martin Landau
“Ageism is something that does exist.”
― Martin Landau
“As a young actor, I was working much more readily and being offered more things.”
― Martin Landau
“I don’t like to do what I call ‘the grunters’ – a character who sits at a table and grunts and young people make fun of. I turn a lot of those down.”
― Martin Landau
“I like a character that is still alive and is necessarily thinking, and either grows or diminishes or whatever.”
― Martin Landau
“I create each character as an individual, coming from a certain place, sounding a certain way, having been introduced to things a certain way.”
― Martin Landau
“Teachers are important in this world.”
― Martin Landau
“I studied with Strasberg, Elia Kazan. They raised the bar. They weren’t easy to please, and they made you achieve the best you could do. That’s what a teacher does: he infuses you with passion for something.”
― Martin Landau
“For my generation of actors, it was about the theatre. Television didn’t exist. Coaxial cable didn’t exist.”
― Martin Landau
“They made a fatal mistake in doing ‘Psycho’ again. Why do that? Why revisit something that stands for itself?”
― Martin Landau
“I did a picture called ‘Lovely, Still’ with Ellen Burstyn, We screened it to the AARP people in Las Vegas, 2000 of them. We got a standing ovation from people who couldn’t stand.”
― Martin Landau
“When someone is there for you, has your back, that’s somebody to pay attention to because that’s a friend.”
― Martin Landau
“I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and ‘inevitability.’ How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.”
― Martin Landau
“My father was an Austrian, and he brought some Torahs over to this country, ancient Torahs that were slipped out of Germany.”
― Martin Landau
“A lot of the bad guys I’ve played just haven’t had much dimension to them.”
― Martin Landau
“I’ve always felt, pound for pound, I’m one of the best guys around; but you get stuck in people’s eyes in a certain way, and it takes an imaginative director who will look at you and realize you can play different kinds of parts because you are an actor.”
― Martin Landau
“I don’t like to sound immodest, but I believe in what I can do. Sometimes it’s been frustrating because I haven’t gotten to bat; if you’re on the bench, and an unimaginative person doesn’t see you as right for a certain role, you don’t get the chance to hit the home run.”
― Martin Landau
“I’ve spent a lot of time playing roles that didn’t really challenge me. I suppose every actor feels that way.”
― Martin Landau
“A lot of the time with an independent production, you go onto the set, and you rehearse it in front of the crew, and at that point, the cinematographer takes over. You start accommodating the camera instead of the camera accommodating you.”
― Martin Landau
“All ‘Hamlets’ are different, and it’s the most overwritten play ever written.”
― Martin Landau
“Every young actor wants to do ‘Hamlet’ on the West End. Why? Because they can bring something to it.”
― Martin Landau
“All an audience wants to believe is that what’s going on is happening for the first time.”
― Martin Landau
“I’ve worked with a lot of wooden actors in my day, but Pinocchio is the best.”
― Martin Landau
“My technique has always been to include all the periphery around me.”
― Martin Landau
“To really have craft, you must be able to repeat something as one has to do in films.”
― Martin Landau
“I always say, if I tell you a joke right now and it’s funny, you laugh. Now, we set the lights, and I tell you the joke again, it’s hard to find it funny the second time.”
― Martin Landau
“My best stuff as a teacher was always to find the problems within each individual actor, and I’ll suggest things that I know that particular actor will have difficulty with.”
― Martin Landau
“I’m a big believer that an actor should be able to pick up any piece of material and act it, the way a good musician can.”
― Martin Landau
“I’m usually cast by people who are oddly goofy.”
― Martin Landau
“Human beings are fascinating with religion and stories about not dying. Or dying and being brought back to life. I think it’s just part of our make up.”
― Martin Landau
“There are not many A-list directors who get to make the movies they want to make. I know two: Woody Allen and Tim Burton. Two different textures, but both get to do what they want, and that’s rare.”
― Martin Landau
“I run the Actor’s Studio on the West Coast, and one of the things I say all the time to the people I teach – many of whom are acting teachers – is that an actor needs to make choices that make him present.”
― Martin Landau
“As a Jew, there’s a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It’s amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There’s a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.”
― Martin Landau
“I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn’t know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don’t think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.”
― Martin Landau
“The way a character sounds is so important to how you’re going to play him.”
― Martin Landau
“If I were a writer, the Pulitzer Prize would be important to me. This is my profession, so an Oscar is important.”
― Martin Landau
“I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.”
― Martin Landau
“I was offered the Gene Hackman role in ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ four times, and I turned it down four times. I didn’t want to do that movie. I called it the upside down boat.”
― Martin Landau
“With ‘Avatar,’ you’re beginning to see the need for less and less actors and less of an appreciation for live acting.”
― Martin Landau
“I still care about human behavior and the art that it takes to write a good piece and to get a cast together who cares enough to put 150 percent of their talent into a project.”
― Martin Landau
“The fact that I wound up doing television and film was just a thing that happened, but I was trained for the theater, and what goes on in the theater has nothing to do with special effects.”
― Martin Landau
“Mankind, his brain has embraced so many amazing things, and yet we’re still beating each other over the heads with clubs, excepting the bullets now, one bullet can wipe out an entire city.”
― Martin Landau
“I’ve got so many stories about every film and show I’ve ever been in.”
― Martin Landau
“In any age range, there are some limitations in terms of good, good parts.”
― Martin Landau
“Years ago on TV, I played people like Doc Holliday and Jesse James on Westerns.”
― Martin Landau
“Actors need to trust themselves. If you trust yourself, you can trust others and leave the director outside.”
― Martin Landau
“I love an actor who comes in, ready to work. It’s like a good tennis player. They hit the ball where you don’t expect it, and it’s great.”
― Martin Landau
“The more complicated the character, the better I am. It’s the one-dimensional crap that I had to do for years that drove me crazy.”
― Martin Landau
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