Colin Firth Quotations

I always thought the biggest failing of Americans was their lack of irony. They are very serious there! Naturally, there are exceptions... the Jewish, Italian, and Irish humor of the East Coast.

We all know the dangers of sequels. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place too often, and I think you've got to move beyond it, go the extra mile and have the courage not to just repeat the first one.

Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.

I think England has served me very well. I like living in London for the reasons I gave. I have absolutely no intentions of cutting those ties. There is absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly not, so that I can have a swimming pool and a palm tree.

My singing voice is somewhere between a drunken apology and a plumbing problem.

I think that London is very much like that. I find there's humour in the air and people are interesting. And I think that it's a place which is constantly surprising. The worst thing about it? I think it can be smug and aggressive.

One of my grandfathers, actually, having gone out there as a minister, decided he would better serve the people as a doctor. So at a very late age - at the age of 38 in fact - he changed course and decided to become a doctor.

Forget trying to be sexy. That's just gruesome.

Most actors will tell you they have some sort of dream of doing something other than what they're doing.

As much as the next person, I want to be approved of, but I'm not greedy for that stuff.

I have a very long relationship with America. My mother grew up there and I felt to some extent that I partly belong there. I was schooled there briefly for about a year.

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.

I would rather five people knew my work and thought it was good work than five million knew me and were indifferent.

Hollywood hasn't aggressively pursued me. Neither have I aggressively pursued Hollywood.

I think it's quite extraordinary that people cast me as if I'm Warren Beatty: until I met my present wife, at the age of 35, you could name two girlfriends.

It used to be that I was always paranoid or a loser or something so there's usually something that you seem to associate yourself with at one time or another.

I don't want to sound smug but I am reasonably satisfied with how it's gone. I think it's fine.

I haven't had to struggle very much. I haven't paid my dues. I think I have been lucky.

If you don't mind haunting the margins, I think there is more freedom there.

Some people would say comedy draws from some dark places, from your dark stuff. Life's great optimists aren't necessarily the funniest people.

The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.

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.

They're not bombarding me with offers, although the ones that have come along have been too preposterous to contemplate, so it's not as if I spend every day resisting $20 million pay cheques.

To be bothered wherever you go - it's not a rational thing to want at all.

I have a kind of neutrality, physically, which has helped me. I have a face that can be made to look a lot better - or a lot worse.

Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.

I do notice that when I've been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments.

I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I'm still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird.

The last thing I would attempt to do is to buy clothes for a child I didn't know well.

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.

I'd love to try my hand at something else.

In this case it appealed to me partly because it felt close to me in some ways. This is about a confused, bewildered middle class Englishman adrift in smalltown America and that has definitely been me.

I'm not patient, and some things drive me crazy. In my work, I get incredibly upset when people don't get it right or don't respect others' needs.

My grandmother was a minister as well, which was not that common in the 1930s.

We've always been involved with America - I have a son who lives there and it's a big part of my life.

I work with the options I have in front of me and my reasons for choosing a job can vary enormously depending on the circumstances. Sometimes I take a job because it's a group of people I'm dying to work with, and sometimes it can be a desire to shake things up a bit and not to take myself too seriously.

My looks aren't something that come dazzlingly through in everything I do. I can be made to look one way or the other fairly easily... I am still not recognised on the street that much.

My primary instinct as an actor is not the big transformation. It's thrilling if a performer can do that well, but that's not me. Often with actors, it's a case of witnessing a big party piece but wondering afterwards, where's the substance?

I was not quite as gracious as Mark Darcy about wearing what my mother tried to make me wear. It tended to stop really, when I was quite young.

I was gearing up for it. I took some singing lessons. And I opened my mouth, and Atom promptly said, 'That's not going to happen. We love your voice, but maybe we could use some of your English wit.' He had doubts about it from way back. For starters, we weren't going to be doing the Italian-American crooning thing.

When I visited coffee farms in Ethiopia, the farmers could not believe we spend a week's wages in their country on a cup of coffee in ours, because they see so little of the profits. Oxfam's fair trade campaign helps right this wrong.

The Hollywood Foreign Press have just given me a time out from my 20-year midlife crisis. My heartfelt thanks to them.

On his fight scene with Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones: It was a delicious experience.

Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.

It's a very dangerous state. You are inclined to recklessness and kind of tune out the rest of your life and everything that's been important to you. It's actually not all that pleasurable. I don't know who the hell wants to get in a situation where you can't bear an hour without somebody's company.

I'm fully aware that if I were to change professions tomorrow, become an astronaut and be the first man to land on Mars, the headlines in the newspapers would read: `Mr. Darcy Lands on Mars.

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.

I have almost no memory of them [St. Trinian's films]. I don't think I've seen them since I was quite young. I was a bit frightened of the girls. I fancied them. Even though I was young, I found them attractive and rather frightening. I've always been attracted to frightening girls! I'm married to one!

The skill of a good actor is to make it always seem like you're in that fantastically spontaneous moment. Very often, a stand-up comedian has a different instinct, which is to reinvent. Once you've laid down some material, and made them laugh, you move on and find some new material.

When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time— not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.

I think everyone is throwing happy stuff at you, and that's when you come over all humbug. It's happy stuff in your face, happy stuff is being sold to you...

The failure so far of the governments of so many of the worlds most powerful countries in the face of such egregious unfairness ... to make the slightest progress on the issue of fair trade is hard to explain.

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.

To work effectively in a film, you have to repeat and work consistently. Basically, you shoot a big master then you do close-ups. You're supposed to be in the same moment, the same 30-second moment, for a day.

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.

No matter how much technique you draw on or how much training you have, acting is a mystery.

I often think it can often be very difficult for comedians to revisit the same gag. I think Russell's a bit more than a comedian.

It's a funny thing - the reality is I have no feelings about school. It's long gone. Funnily enough, the bad memories - of which I don't have any left to be honest, I can just remember a sense of tedium - have faded. And teachers that I liked have remained quite vivid. There are three or four left.

I think it helps to get a film made because people who put money in are nervous. They like to have something recognisable enough to make them secure that there's a pattern there - that someone else put their money into something like this and made it back.

I can't bring you absolute truth in the detailed factual sense. All I can do is bring you an interpretation as I understand it. That's all you can ever get from an actor.

And that is a hard route for a woman to come through. There's still a lot of roles that have to be conformed to. It's quite an old fashioned environment in a lot of ways.

Less racist now but it has been. I don't think it's been completely stamped out. There's a class element to it. And who's supposed to do what. You're very unlikely to get a gay grip.

I've actually heard people protesting furiously about straight male costume people as well. It's not universal and there are examples that break the mould all over the place. In my experience, it's more prevalent in the UK than in America.

I don't think it's aiming at gags, I think the humour is woven into it. It's part of how the characters operate and how they deal with disaster because they're worldly enough to have a bit of irony and wryness about their own circumstances. So, I think the humour comes out of that.

But this is where you get all the market research and things get in danger of becoming formulaic, and where you depend on brands and getting recognised actors. It's the thing that precludes risk very often, otherwise everyone would be avant-garde all over the place.

I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there's nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: "Let's get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film."

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.

I don't know if there's a problem with original ideas... I think a healthy film industry should have a good supply of good, original writing.

The way I've described Helen's sort of rigorous honesty I just think he also has tremendously. It's very strange... he just has this sort of way of making it happen really. You're not really aware of being directed, so much as being a part of this thing.

If I'd loved my chemistry teacher and my maths teacher, goodness knows what direction my life might have gone in. I remember there was a primary school teacher who really woke me up to the joys of school for about one year when I was ten. He made me interested in things I would otherwise not have been interested in - because he was a brilliant teacher. He was instrumental in making me think learning was quite exciting.

It's an unknown quantity. It's actually almost a cliché to say it, how hard comedy is. What's that famous quote? "Dying is easy, comedy's hard." I think the broader it gets, if you miss by a millimetre, you've missed completely. It's a very hard thing to do.

But it's interesting being directed by someone who is a very good actor. There's nothing like it. It might sound like a territorial thing about what I do, but I don't think you can understand what it is until you've done it. I know that to be a fact.

However good a communicator a director is, unless they've been actors, it's just not the same as the shorthand you get with someone who's been an actor.

So, I think there's a danger that good stuff can fall by the wayside if it doesn't conform to formula. But I think it comes down to money and they just don't know where it's going if they haven't got any precedent.

I find that at almost every press junket I get that comment, "this character's different from what you generally play..." And that's OK! But I think "generally play" stems back to Mr Darcy. I'm fine with it but I tend to find that if it's a departure, which in other people's words it always is, it's always a departure from that.

Something like Shakespeare in Love, which became such an established hit that it now seems like a foregone conclusion... but it really wasn't. The script was around for a very, very long time and had people chickening out all the time.

Some people come up to be directors by coming through the camera department and there's not a lot of women in the camera department. The ones that are have to kind of prove they're one of the boys, I think. I don't want to get into trouble with generalisations but I think it's a fair observation.

There's a para-phrase about Orson Welles saying: "Great films are made by great directors and the rest are made by everyone else." I've been very lucky... before I start insulting the profession of directing, but I think a good director is everything and a bad director really is nothing at all.

It's hard to get yourself into a position where someone will trust you to direct a film anyway, whatever sex you are. Certainly in England, the film set is a very male preserve. There's a lot of very rough looking men pushing equipment around that don't want the gaffer to be a girl.

They said: "Make it in this amount of time and go for it now..." Which is why I was suddenly ambushed and we all found ourselves doing it. I suspect this wasn't quite recognisable in its genre to give people the confidence just to throw money at it.

So, if you haven't picked up some tips during an apprenticeship like that, you shouldn't be directing. It doesn't mean you can do it, but it loads you up with information.

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.

Directors don't get to see other directors at work - they're the only one on the set. I've met directors who've asked me what another filmmaker is like. So, there's probably nobody better placed to make all the comparisons and to pick up stuff than an actor.

If you're playing someone who's got marital problems, you have to play someone who's trying not to have marital problems. So, you've got to get into the problem first.

There's no point in it unless it's a story that you really want to tell. It's a nebulous job. Unless you're doing it well, you're not doing anything. And there are a few of those. It's perfectly possible to be a passenger on a film set because if somebody else has written it, you can make nothing of that role and that's exactly what bad directors do.

Certainly, from where I stand, I'm not a specialist in wildly different walks and voices. But I find as much variation and nuance as what satisfies me in what I do. So, I don't find this particularly different. He has his own peculiarities. You're probably talking about a cluster of Englishmen in suits but I've done quite a big cluster of guys not in suits as well, which I've occupied myself with. So, I don't find that this is the one that stands out.

So, you don't have laughs as a reference point any more, it becomes a bit of a science after that. And the last thing, you would love to be able to depend on a sense of spontaneity, but hours of waiting and then hours of repetition are not conducive to spontaneity so those are your obstacles. On the other hand it's a lot of fun. Plunging into a bit of physical comedy and abandoning all dignity, no one can really hurt you much after you much after that, once you've done it.

I have a great deal of respect for the craft, I don't know how much respect it has for me. But it's a precision process. Doing it on stage would be, I think, terrifying. Doing it on film has its own difficulties, because film is not conducive to spontaneity. You might have a run through and get a few chuckles at eight o'clock in the morning, but you don't keep laughing at the same thing all day long.

If I were to write a book about the progress of getting to a third film, it would be a long one.

It was mainly to do with Helen Hunt, to be honest. That's what drew my attention to it. I was interested in the fact that she was going to be directing. I'd never met her but she projects a degree of intelligence and it was convincing t me that she'd be able to handle this sort of material very well.

Nothing brings you closer together than blind terror.

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.

Just driving I just was in a car on flat ground and I couldn't make it go. Having ticked driving and taken three driving lessons, I just was unable to produce any motion whatsoever under perfectly normal circumstances. I think we've all been busted on driving, and riding.

I can actually get involved in getting stories off the ground that no one would ask me to be in because I'm the wrong age, the wrong sex, the wrong nationality, or whatever. I've found it quite exhilarating to have that freedom to tell the stories that aren't just about middle-aged white English guys.

The great thing about dealing with people about whom we have historical resources, is that if the writing needs work, there's everywhere to go to enrich it.

Doing a job, or even watching a film, can make a difference to your life, but I don't think it ever has an explosive impact where your life will never be the same again. It kind of seeps into your life, and perhaps realise you're a little more vigilant about certain things than you might have been.

Sometimes to think about why some institutions are stable, it's interesting to go one generation back and look at the author of that stability.

When I look in the mirror, I don't see my Dad, I see my grandmother. For a while it was my mother looking back at me. If only it was my Dad.

Comedy - particularly the frothy and frivolous - is notoriously neglected by festivals and awards. But it's bloody hard to get right.

Whenever you take on playing a villain, he has to cease to be a villain to you. If you judge this man by his time, he's doing very little wrong.