Parenting & Family Quote by Ellen Burstyn

There’s a blunt candor here that lands like a door slamming: “the central problem of killing” treated not as a melodramatic shock, but as craft. Burstyn frames violence the way an actor frames breath control - procedural, technical, solved through choices. That’s the hook: she refuses the audience’s preferred story that performance is pure emotion. She’s talking about method, and the method is moral quicksand.

The phrase “How you go about killing” is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s actorly problem-solving: blocking, psychology, stakes. Underneath, it’s an admission that screen violence isn’t just an effect, it’s a decision tree. Kill cleanly or messily? With hesitation or relief? From rage, love, fear, duty? Those micro-choices are what make a scene believable, and also what make it disturbing - because they force the performer to inhabit the logic that violence uses to justify itself.

Then comes the self-interruption: “I had to kill my children - well, I didn’t want to get that far.” That “well” is the audible brake squeal of conscience. It reveals the boundary between exploring darkness and being consumed by it. She’s not denying the role; she’s negotiating with it, drawing a line between empathy (entering a character’s mind) and endorsement (letting that mind feel like home).

As an actress from the New Hollywood era, Burstyn is speaking from a moment when realism became a cultural demand: audiences wanted truth, and performers were expected to pay for it. The quote exposes the cost - and the careful, sometimes frightened calculus behind “making it real.”