I consider myself more of a visual comedian than a physical one. Rowan Atkinson More Quotes by Rowan Atkinson More Quotes From Rowan Atkinson For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic. Rowan Atkinson atheism religious ideas Lord, thy one-liners are as good as thy tricks. Thou art indeed an all-round family entertainer. Rowan Atkinson one-liner lord art Paris in the mid-'50s was a very interesting place. It was only ten years after the Third Reich had left, and the city was awash with guns, and crime, and racketeering, and all sorts of hangovers from a very difficult time in French history. So it's an interesting time to be a policeman. Rowan Atkinson hangover gun years What directors of television drama constantly tell you is 'Don't act it. Don't try. Don't emphasise that word'. Whereas with someone like Blackadder, even though he's a relatively low key character in a way, he did relish the lines that he had and the words that he was given, with a lot of inflection. Rowan Atkinson keys character drama Get that right, then- if you get the quality right, then the marketability or whatever; your ability to sell videos or your ability to earn money or whatever, will follow naturally. But try to be creatively lead rather than market lead. And that's important to me. Rowan Atkinson quality important trying It certainly helps, I think, with some actors to understand the process of acting. You see what extraordinary pressure they're under, there's a huge circus dedicated to a particular moment and they're got to deliver and it can help that you, even if empathetically alone, understand what they're doing. Rowan Atkinson actors acting thinking A law which attempts to say you can criticise and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed. Rowan Atkinson religious law ideas I have a problem with Porsches. They're wonderful cars, but I know I could never live with one. Somehow, the typical Porsche people-and I wish them no ill-are not, I feel, my kind of people. I don't go around saying that Porsches are a pile of dung, but I do know that psychologically I couldn't handle owning one. Rowan Atkinson car wish people I mean I can do it when I'm very relaxed, and with good friends, then I think I can be amusing. Rowan Atkinson mean-girls good-friend thinking But, actually, so many of the clerics that I've met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society. Rowan Atkinson arrogance church people Confronting a stadium audience, you can't see the whites of their eyes. It's just an amorphous mass of noise and, of course, you can't see the alleged billions watching at home either, so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low. Rowan Atkinson degrees eye home In the modern media age we are rarely surprised by what we see. Whether it's on television or film or in the theatre, everything is so advertised, so trailed, that most entertainment is merely what you thought it was going to be like. Rowan Atkinson theatre media age Marketing is what gets you noticed. Rowan Atkinson marketing Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing. Rowan Atkinson python jewels oxford It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character. Rowan Atkinson tvs character needs In TV, and in particular in commercials, you don't really need to explain very much at all - you just say he's a spy and he's a little bit theatrical and overblown and smug and he's not very good at his job. Rowan Atkinson spy jobs needs We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming. Rowan Atkinson important challenges years Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something - this side of it, if you like, doing interviews - is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project. Rowan Atkinson interviews marketing sides I would never be a television presenter. It's not something I could ever do. Rowan Atkinson presenter television Certainly in the second film [Maigret's Dead Man], which is quite a more unpleasant and darker story, it's quite different in tone and feel. Rowan Atkinson tone different men
