Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What people think improvisation is and non-improvisation is, it's nothing to do with what you like or dislike. It's all about how it happens with certain directors and certain scenes. That's the way it works. It's not something, in general, that you can decide.
For me, creatively, I'd suffocate if I played the same thing, over and over again. I want challenges. I want to sit down with a director and be like, "I've never done this before, but it's going to be exciting. It's scary, but really thrilling, so let's do it!"
It's dangerous for one actor to advise another one, especially when you're not in charge. On the set, I'm never gonna tell another person, "Here's what I think you should do." That's a discussion they should only have with the writers, producers, and directors.
As the director, you're meant to be critical and you are, so there are loads of things. But the thing is, the way I look at it is, to try to get some measure of success, it's dangerous to look at financial or critical success, or positive response as a measure.
All directors are control freaks and very obsessive. I get the feeling that directors as kids, they all have had a childhood with not too much contact with other kids. They constructed their own reality and they continue to do it. It's a funny breed, directors.
I think the whole movement of #MeToo is not just calling out the sexual harassers, which is really important, but also crying out that we want equal pay, equal representation, equal opportunities, and that we want to see more female directors and photographers.
As an actor, I know immediately if I'm saying a word that doesn't feel right coming out of my mouth, and I know how to change it. But as a director watching something, or even as a writer reading a script, sometimes it's not always clear what needs to be fixed.
One of the things that's awesome about being an actor is that you get to do stories, live lives and have experiences that you never could have even conceived of, and that's because you're living in another writer's imagination and another director's imagination.
Everyone talks about reality TV and that there are no roles left. That's false. Years ago, there were three networks. Now there are 20 cable networks and so many ways for films to be exhibited. It's an exciting time for actors, writers, directors, and producers.
The work I'm doing on the screen differs from that of anyone else. My comedy is of a peculiar nature...no writers have been developed along the lines of my type of comedy and this is why I sometimes have differences with writers, supervisors and directors alike.
I guess the story that best defines us [with Bud Yorkin] and our relationship goes back to the [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis show. The four stage managers on that show became major TV creators and directors - John Rich, Jack Smight, Arthur Penn and Bud Yorkin.
In theater, you're in charge of your performance, and at the end of the day you're the one who gets credit because you're in front of the audience doing it, and in film and TV it's the director who gets to decide when to cut to you on a line, which take he uses.
I have known Tarell Alvin McCraney for ten years but the involvement with Moonlight came more with Barry Jenkins, the director. He was a fan of the show I did called The Knick. He was also with Plan B Entertainment, who produced Selma. That is how I got involved.
A writer/director is a tough thing to gauge when someone hasn't directed a movie before. You just don't know. Sometimes it will be a great script that's written beautifully, and then the director who has also written it does not have the facility to translate it.
Being the director is really something. It's a statement of something and you have to stand up for that. Okay, this is what I see. This is how I see the world. This is how I see cinema. And you have to be able to talk about that and explain it and be responsible.
In my own life, I have noticed when I have been meeting directors, that the same sentence with the same inflection can be said by a man, like: "Get me this." But if the same thing is said by a woman, it's seen as harsh and unacceptable. That always fascinates me.
You know, the dirty secret in the Director's Guild is that the average life expectancy of Director's Guild members is 57 years old. The stress level is so high and directors are generally really out of shape, cause they sit in the chair and they eat craft service.
The choice that you really have is that you can go and work for TV which is so badly paid that you have to really churn them out which I think probably helps you develop certain muscles. I'm not sure though that you really want to have those muscles as a director.
I had to be naked [in Vinyl], but I was almost more nervous about having to be drunk. The director wasn't going to yell, "Too big!," during the nude scene. For the drunk scene, you can be bad drunk or good drunk. We'll see. My wife was not happy, hearing about it.
It's a surreal thing because you are there and made up and dressed up as if you're making the film. You do the scene, which is going to be in the film, and I met him [Daniel Craig] and I'm working with the director, and so it is different to just a normal audition.
Since stepping down as laboratory director in 1999, I have devoted an increasing fraction of my time to international issues. I am involved with energy, environment, and sustainability issues, particularly as they involve new energy sources free of greenhouse gases.
To be honest, I don't usually do very much research, especially if I'm working with a director who also wrote the screenplay. They've usually done a tonne of research. And they'll tell you about it from their perspective which is better than doing your own research.
Some directors, like Stevens [George Stevens], shoot full circle, 360 degrees, and that's what's right for them. I generally shoot at about a seven to one ratio. But part of that is because I've worked on every screenplay, so I'm further along in the visual concept.
There are many directors in the middle range who've made mostly successful pictures, and then there are a few great directors who've had some successes and some failures. I suppose my life would be smoother if I wasn't almost totally enamored of the latter category.
I went to meet Joe Johnston, the director, and he's charming. I've been very lucky. Most of the directors I've worked with are charming. But Joe's a particularly charming man, and he showed me lots of designs and, rather memorably, welcomed me to the Marvel Universe.
The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors, and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts.
A fantastic actor in a scene that's just closed off will be good. But when working with a director who knows little tricks - correct music, slowly pushing in - that stunning performance will somehow become even better. I've always seen it as a symbiotic relationship.
Frankly, I was extremely jealous of his scenes with Zoe Saldana and I think it's totally unfair that I never got to do that. I will never forgive the writers and the director, for having put me in this position, to have to be watching that, rather than participating.
Breakfast Club was great because we had a real rehearsal, and we shot primarily in sequence. I thought that was going to be how movies were done. I didn't really know how lucky we all were. We had a director that liked actors. I didn't know that was going to be rare.
One of my first jobs was in a soap opera, five days a week. And what I found is, although there are different directors coming in and different crews, you just lived in your character. It's the nature of the story, the ongoing story, and it can get deeper and deeper.
If you're sounding right, you're probably walking right, and vice versa. If you get the footwork right - if you get even one line right in a rehearsal, the director will say, do you know when you said that, it was exactly the character. You were - really landed on it.
I was in good shape from Divergent. Damien Chazelle, the director of Whiplash told me, 'Stop Working Out! Don't go outside!' He wanted me pale and doughy. This is the first movie where I shut myself off from the world. It was, by far, the hardest thing I've ever done.
Clark Gregg and I are around the same age. He has been an actor and is a writer. But with a first-time director, there is a way to talk about things they might not know. Because Clark was an actor, though, he knew more about the process than most first-time directors.
I still feel lucky whenever I hear a director say, "Action!" Because then I think, "Whoa, I'm really in the movies. This is a real thing happening." I've never not been enthralled by that. I still love it. I still love hearing it, and I feel really lucky all the time.
I don't want to infantilize the actor; I want to empower the actor. Actors can be many things, but all of the really good ones are really great storytellers, and I'm interested in that. If you're not interested in that as a director then you better be Stanley Kurbrick.
Director and producers have to take all the risks they can. We developed this film with the possibility to create departing from a blank page and to discover things as the process went along and as we understood the things that at first we couldn't understand in words.
I think the other honest attraction was that I just grew up loving watching TV and loving watching film, and there's so many directors and actors that I dreamed of working with, I just really wanted to take a crack at it and see if I could ever work with some of those.
There was a Russian director named Elem Klimov, who did his films during the communist days. They were constantly struggling with the authorities and to be allowed to express themselves. But he did one of the best war movies I've ever seen - it's called 'Come and See.'
Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.
If I had not been successful as a director, then I'm sure I would still be telling stories. I would have continued on 16mm or found a different medium through which to tell them. Maybe they would have been less glamorous than films, but I would continue to tell stories.
The great thing about having spent all this time on film sets is that I've been able to watch directors and how they work. I now know that this is what I want to do as well: to tell stories visually. But it's definitely my vision that I want to put across, nobody else's.
In Hong Kong, particularly, we craft this art for decades. The action choreographer actually is the action director. He takes over and he choreographs with - by himself or with his team, and place the camera where he feels cinematic effect to bring out that choreography.
It's impossible to put your finger on what that is exactly other than protecting the environment that the actors get to find the scenes and build the scenes and invest in them. I think that's key and that's what I've learned from all the great directors I've worked with.
For 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona,' for example, Woody Allen is one of the greatest American directors, and we really had a very good working relationship. We understand each other really well. He gave me one of the best opportunities somebody has ever given me in my career.
An Ingmar Bergman film would probably owe a sizeable bulk of its import and its direction and its quality to the directorial end and to the director because it's uniquely a Bergman film. But that again is not the general - no, that's much more the exception than the rule.
You have to take away the idea that something you do is right or wrong. I don't think there's a right or a wrong; I think there's an "it works" or "it doesn't work" for the whole. And that's why you need a director you trust, so you can just keep throwing out suggestions.
I certainly like the actor to have as much lee-way as possible. In the same way that director Bong was generous enough to let me create, you have to do that for actors, as well, and let them use the tools they have, and part of that is their own brains and their own words.
I started working with James [Schamus] early on, and my role as an executive producer was more about being involved in the conversations of putting the film together. I didn't have to do much work because James is the most experienced first-time director you could imagine.
A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.
I detest producing. I mean, I feel like I do it to enable myself to do all the other stuff that I do love, but I find it's in conflict with the other roles because the producer needs to be the one who says "No" and the director and the writer need to let their mind be free.