Appreciation

Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Christoph Waltz interviewed in Time:

TIME: What is it like to receive all these awards? Does it even matter if you get an Oscar, or is the praise enough?

WALTZ: Praise is nothing that accumulates. Praise is a sequence, especially if you've toiled for a long time. Praise does not pile up. So in a way, you can't get too much. I don't consider it to be a quantity that you can measure by volume. There's a new aspect to the appreciation and the acknowledgment every time, because it's always coming from somewhere else. So I try to take the praise very specifically, because then I really can utilize it as an encouragement. It's like a finger that points in a certain direction. I take praise as not just a reward and a result but also as the beginning of a new process.

If this role [in Inglorious Basterds] hadn't come along, would you still be an actor? Would you still believe in the craft?

I probably would still be an actor, because this is what I make a living doing, and I have been making a living with it for so long. To chuck it all in and start something else — it's a bit too late. Would I still believe in the craft? Absolutely, but on my terms, and that's where the difficulty would set in. It would feel like fighting a lost cause. But because I'm so bloody stubborn, I would fight it anyway... But all of a sudden — with the emphasis on sudden — it looks like it's not a lost cause. It looks like I was not traveling on the wrong steamship in the wrong direction. So in a way, after 30-something years, it's more than gratifying, it's more than just an accolade. It's really like a new start.