Tobin Bell

“There are a lot of considerations that come into play when you craft one of these 'Saw' scripts, and there's only so much you can put into them.”

“I'm always amazed... I took my 11-year-old to an oceanography camp, and these girls came over to me, and my son was like 'Oh here we go, Dad,' because they had been looking. They were like, 'You're the guy, aren't you?' And I said, 'Well, maybe.' They said, 'He is, he's the guy on 'Charmed!'”

“You know, the best-laid plans of mice and men... I like playing bad guys, and I don't have a problem doing that. They're interesting characters, and there's as many different kinds of bad guys as there are good guys - they're rich, they're strong, they're powerful, and so that's fine with me.”

“'Buried Alive' is a little scary, but also a comedy at the same time.”

“One of the first speaking roles I had was in a film called 'Svengali', with Peter O'Toole and Elizabeth Ashley. I was a waiter, and I had about three lines. And I was ready! I had been around people like that, and I knew they were just actors. All the work I had done, it was all there, and I felt like I knew all the mechanics.”

“Actors have seven tracks going in their minds: They've got all the research they've done for the part, then they have whatever the director asked them to do, then they've got what the departments like special effects need them to do.”

“I was raised on Westerns. They were part of what going into the movies was.”

“It's a great challenge and a wonderful journey how to figure out how to be an artist and to carve my way.”

“If you're an impressionistic painter and you want to paint expressionism, you've got to change. You've got to figure out a way to do it and do it. If you've been playing jazz all your life and you want to start to play rock n' roll, blues, then do it.”

“An actor puts himself in the hands of a director. And the director's first responsibility, obviously, is to tell the story, but the smallest thing that's not true reads on the screen. So if a director sees that an actor is not believable, he needs to help him become believable.”

“I've worked with multiple directors throughout the 'Saw' series with a lot of conversations as they bring their particular installment to the screen. If I've been able to do anything throughout the course of these films, it's been to help shape dialogue and to try to make things as delicate and as intelligent as I can.”

“All I can do is do my best work, try to create the best kind of moment to moment reality that I can do. That's what I do. I'm an actor. And all the rest of it is like baseball. You hit the ball. Sometimes it goes in the hole. Sometimes it goes to the player.”

“One of the interesting things about 'Saw' is that you don't find out about things in sequential or linear order. One of the things that fans have liked a lot is, we don't forget about details. They come back and reveal themselves as the story evolves.”

“In the the late seventies and early eighties, I played background roles in thirty movies... Woody Allen movies, Scorsese films, you name it. Whatever was being shot in New York, I was doing stand-in and background work because I wanted to be close to the camera; I wanted to see what was going on.”

“Anything that exists on the human palette is, from my point of view, fair game for artists to portray. You don't have to go see it if you don't want to, so don't go.”

“What's interesting is that you can have a set that's very calm, very smooth, very cooperative... and end up with a terrible movie. And you can have a set that's really horrible as far as relationships and volatility, and come up with a great movie. Sometimes that energy gets infused into what ends up on film - it's interesting in that way.”

“'Saw' is a particularly popular film with 14-30 year olds, so I'll be at a playground and meet six or 10 skateboarders who just wanna talk about 'Saw.'”

“Halloween is fun, but it wasn't always my favorite holiday. I think Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.”

“'Saw' has been a unique experience in that I've had the opportunity to work with some really great artists, and everyone has contributed in so many different ways, in all of the different departments of a film crew.”

“Watching a child first learn to crawl on a carpet somehow has more significance to you as you get a little older. Perhaps it is that you have suffered more.”