Liv Ullmann Quotes - Page 2

I consider myself a realist who wants to stand up for women's voices, not when they try to be the same, but when they stand up for who we are and what we see and how important it is that our voice is heard.

It is tough to be a woman. Also as an actor, but more so as a director. And even more today, when distributors and producers are looking at different kinds of films and maybe not necessarily what a woman would want to do.

Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool.

There is a difference between film and digital. Because digital, you know, it's perfect and whatever. But with film, you get depth. You get subject.

Colin [Farrell] I talked to several times on the phone, and I said, remember, we have only twenty-five days of doing the movie [Miss Julie], so you must know some of your text. I was a little un-feminist, I didn't want to say [bossy voice] "learn your text!" But when he came, he knew all his text.

I had the advantage, that I know Swedish. So I had the Swedish book and I had a lot of English translations, and German translations, and I did everything to make the best English translation of August Strindberg's Miss Julie I could. And then, there I went. "Oh! I think she's thinking this, but I think she should say it!" And so on. It's wonderful to do that.

I realize that we've come to a different way of showing movies. But I'm still with the old ways, and I can't change.

Since suffering confers no rights on its victims, we who witness are the ones responsible for restoring these lost rights.

August Strindberg gave me the opportunity to have this incredible story [Miss Julie ], about the class system, about unfairness in life, but also this story about man and woman. What I wanted, because he gave me the freedom, to give her a voice that I missed a little in her.

I have the experience of age and suffering.

We are equal human beings, and we were born with evil and anger and misunderstanding of what a man is, and so we are as needy and wanting to be part of him, as he, obviously, was needing and wanting to be part of us. And that's why I've really taken the freedom, because it's an adaptation, to give her a voice.

I can't expect people to decide that they will change with me, so I can see why I'm on the old side.

Film is wonderful as opposed to theater, because it will always live there, and they will always be seen.

Yeah, unfortunately [ films like Miss Julie are a dying breed]. And that is sad, because we need these. Like we need books, we need classical music, we need ballet, we need opera, to remind us really of who we are and why we are, and we need in movie houses - even to be in a movie - where you sit and see not only excitement and man-hero, woman-hero, you need quietly, just like that Hawking movie we talked about, to know how people overcome.

We need feminist voices today, you know. In my time, we had incredible feminist voices and I'm sure we have it today, too, but in all the massive outlets, maybe the one or two or three voices are somehow disappearing.

You see that a lot in movies, and today you see it more in movies that are made, because I feel more movies are made towards groups than towards individuals, and they're made more for mass media than for sitting in a movie house allowing it to happen.

The age, you know. A man can be wiser and wiser, and a woman is older and older.

I'm maybe not so much an exception, maybe because I've lived so long that more is coming, more is there.

The void Papa's death left in me became a kind of cavity, into which later experiences were to be laid.

The Summer Book is beautiful and warm, with the kind of wisdom we can adapt to our everyday lives.

If a person is found dead here, a postmorten will always reveal whether he has spent less than three weeks in the city. That is the length of time it takes this pollution to invade the body, after which it is there forever.

I believe that it is sometimes less difficult to wake up and feel that I am alone when I really am, than to wake up with someone else and be lonely.

Soon I will be an old, white-haired lady, into whose lap someone places a baby, saying, "Smile, Grandma!" - I, who myself so recently was photographed on my grandmother's lap.

Ibsen was Norwegian by birth, but universal in spirit.