“Well, you need the villain. If you don’t have a villain, the good guy can stay home.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Something that is very special today might not be special tomorrow, but to hold it, to grasp it, to keep it, to make it special, to elevate it from the ordinary, that’s when you open up the champagne. To make it sparkle.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Sometimes I do stuff where people say, ‘Why did you do that?’ And you know, it’s very simple. I do it because I’ve never done it before.”
― Christoph Waltz
“The villain is usually the most interesting part. But it has to be a smart thing. Just dumb cliche villains with a Russian accent and big muscles and a mean face, I don’t know. My Russian accent isn’t that great, and the muscles aren’t that big and the mean face is not enough. You know what I mean? It gets very boring. Tedious stuff.”
― Christoph Waltz
“When a new book comes out or becomes accessible in whatever form, I get it and I read it.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I take praise as not just a reward and a result but also as the beginning of a new process.”
― Christoph Waltz
“You can’t always do the extraordinary, in between you have to do the ordinary. Because if you didn’t, what would constitute the extraordinary?”
― Christoph Waltz
“There is one thing I do miss in L.A. I love autumn.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Becoming an actor is like becoming a father. It’s not hard to become one. Making a life of it is the challenge.”
― Christoph Waltz
“It’s easy to not feel misplaced if this tidal wave of appreciation is coming your way.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I only do what I like to do.”
― Christoph Waltz
“You know, I don’t talk about the characters that I play. Years ago, I was a little timid about it and I kind of squirmed when I was asked, ‘Could you tell us something about your character.’ Now with a little self-confidence that comes with the grey beard, I just flatly refuse.”
― Christoph Waltz
“You see, my version of why anyone would want to become an actor is that it’s some psychological fixation, something that happened in puberty that you didn’t outgrow in time, which is normal. Nevertheless, if you make it a profession, it can be really neurotic.”
― Christoph Waltz
“By looking into more details of American history, we can make more sense of what’s happening today.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Everything that happens later in life is appreciated in a different way. You can appreciate the thing for what it is, which you couldn’t if you were 25 and had never experienced much else. You would take it all for granted and think that’s what life is like.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Praise is nothing that accumulates. Praise is a sequence, especially if you’ve toiled for a long time. Praise does not pile up. So in a way, you can’t get too much. I don’t consider it to be a quantity that you can measure by volume.”
― Christoph Waltz
“You’re always being cast for what you’ve been in last.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I have always been so interested in film as a medium.”
― Christoph Waltz
“You get hit over the knuckles enough, you don’t stick them out anymore.”
― Christoph Waltz
“It bothers me that people who should know better believe a glossy magazine fantasy.”
― Christoph Waltz
“The fact that Facebook presents facial recognition programmes as a desirable development, well, that in itself is a decisive step toward fascism, as far as I’m concerned.”
― Christoph Waltz
“The bohemian artist who exists only for his art, it’s a myth. OK, it might have been true for Giacometti, but it certainly wasn’t for Picasso or Mozart.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I’ve done so many jobs because I’ve had to, not because I’ve wanted to. And it’s honourable to do a job because you need to feed your children, and maybe there is also something in it for your development as an actor. But only up to a point.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I think in Europe, movies are made like a commodity and then sold as art.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Ten flashing lights are a nuisance but 500 are fantastic.”
― Christoph Waltz
“You know, I don’t support esoteric approaches to acting.”
― Christoph Waltz
“It’s a wonderful narrative device to bring someone from the outside and look through his eyes if you want to describe the absurdity and preposterous reality that is accepted amongst the ones who are inside.”
― Christoph Waltz
“For a while, I couldn’t decide whether or not I should pursue singing in the opera or acting. And I’m glad that I chose the latter because I wasn’t a very good singer.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I used to hate exposure situations. What is generally referred to as ‘red carpet.’”
― Christoph Waltz
“I’m very bad with improvisation. I hate it.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I’m not really all that familiar with comic book culture.”
― Christoph Waltz
“My agent is the quickest, sharpest man on earth.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I’m trying to be very aware of not repeating myself.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I’m open to working anywhere, but not on anything.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Stephen Sondheim I am in awe of.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I think Stephen Sondheim is a – and I hardly ever use this word – but this is as close as it gets to a genius.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Look at ISIS – without the Internet, they wouldn’t exist in the same form. The Internet didn’t create them, but the Internet facilitates them. And as we know from history, the facilitation is more dangerous than the cause, because the cause can be dealt with, but the facilitation is elusive.”
― Christoph Waltz
“The actor is there to translate what’s on the page onto the stage or the screen. So I find it important that an actor manages to actually get out of the way, vanish as a person behind the character, never to be seen or talked about again. That’s my philosophy.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Our hubris needs to be downsized, thinking that profiteering on Earth, on whatever level – environmentally, economically, culturally – is unlimited and everybody should get as much as he wants or she wants. Humans need to be shrunk again to their actual size.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I am almost neurotically private myself. Because I think it’s an important distinction to make between privacy and public sphere.”
― Christoph Waltz
“It would be completely laughable if I claimed I was always motivated by the pure craft of acting and that recognition doesn’t play a part. Of course it does – that’s human nature.”
― Christoph Waltz
“There is no such thing as pure art. It’s a bourgeois conceit.”
― Christoph Waltz
“It’s not the number of trucks parked outside that make a movie interesting but if you have more money, you have more time. More time enables you to try out other possibilities or follow an interesting lead. I don’t like indulgence, but to have more possibilities is always more interesting.”
― Christoph Waltz
“It took me a lot of times watching it that I started to appreciate ‘Pulp Fiction.’”
― Christoph Waltz
“I wouldn’t really, realistically speaking, know the difference between wearing an S.S. uniform and a U.S. Marine uniform. To me it’s all a uniform.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I’ve always been able to work as an actor and support my family and did great jobs, and more often than not, I got to turn down jobs that I didn’t really want to do for various reasons or refuse to work with people I didn’t like – and there are quite a few.”
― Christoph Waltz
“I know from my experience in theater that the crowd is different every night; the reactions, the tension. But it’s true for film as well, going from country to country and culture to culture. The difference between California and New York responses, for example. It’s really fascinating.”
― Christoph Waltz
“It’s a misconception that you don’t have seasons in southern California. They are just very subtle. The vegetation is very different. Plants react differently. You just have to be a little more observant.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Europeans still believe that working is for living. Americans often have that the other way around.”
― Christoph Waltz
“’The Philadelphia Story’ is one of my favorite movies.”
― Christoph Waltz
“Cary Grant is really the master of not taking himself so seriously.”
― Christoph Waltz
“A James Bond film can be artistically fulfilling. Absolutely it can. It can be complex, and it can be interesting. I consider Bond movies to be an extension of popular theatre, a kind of modern mythology. You see the same sort of action in ‘Punch and Judy’ or in the folk theatre of various cultures, like ‘Grand Guignol.’”
― Christoph Waltz
“The thing about ‘Spectre’ is that it is not the work of hack writers. It does not have a hack director. The actors are not hams.”
― Christoph Waltz
“As a motivation in itself, celebrity is foolhardy and stupid.”
― Christoph Waltz
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