Brando's Smile Quotes

“People who worked with Brando often marveled at his powers of concentration. He could immerse himself in scenes, ignoring cameras and lights as well as directors, like no one else.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“The cavalrymen and settlers who slaughtered the Indians weren’t inherently evil” but rather products of a culture that demonized Indians, which doesn’t “excuse our country’s refusal to settle a debt that is long overdue.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“Brando rarely played a father on film—his lone previous exception was The Godfather—and the decision to assume the role of a diabolical patriarch at a time when his own family life was in such disarray exemplifies an extraordinary confluence of private and public experience.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“He cared so much that he needed to pretend he didn’t care at all.” One of the not-so-well-kept secrets of Brando’s life was his dedication to the craft that he revolutionized and complained about—endlessly.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“People were to compare them but they weren’t alike. Marlon, well trained by Stella Adler, had excellent technique. He was proficient in every aspect of acting, including characterization and makeup. He was also a great mimic.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“On film, he said, “The face becomes the stage,” and the eyes were the storytellers. An actor’s lines were far less important than what he communicated with his eyes.24”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“Brando knew that an actor’s belief in his imaginary creation was the key to his power, and that awareness transferred readily from stage to screen.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“How did groups become hordes? What made some nations reject totalitarian ideas and others embrace them?”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“As he wrote in Notes for his Autobiography, “It’s hard to believe that there isn’t any acceptable reason for living other than seeing the kids get through before I go—I want to scratch something on the wall of the cave, to leave a grain of something that said I was alive for some pale sliver of a moment in the evening of this species; there has to be something more than just shuffling softly toward the turnstile with our cross-town Transfers to Eternity in our hands.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“Despite his peripatetic life, and appetite for novelty, he was in crucial respects a creature of habit, with a deep center of gravity. He usually knew what he wanted, even if that might change so radically from one moment to the next as to make him appear completely indecisive.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“Robert Duvall also learned from Brando during filming to deemphasize the idea of a beginning. With Brando, Duvall noted, there was no deliberate start to a performance, no end; he talked as he moved onto the set, as if the scene were part of an ongoing conversation.36 He eliminated the border between behaving and acting.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“The Brando described here knew a loneliness that felt, he said, as if he were “out on a limb, . . . and none of the other birds will talk to you.”20”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“He had a wide-ranging curiosity and was suspicious of absolutes and rigidity of any kind, rejecting the pressure to conform to a single likeness.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

“The face is an extraordinarily subtle instrument,” he noted. “I believe it has 155 muscles in it. The interaction of those muscles can hide a great deal, and people are always concealing emotions.”
― Susan L. Mizruchi, Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work