Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
As much as I love creating entertaining visuals, I love toying with the pace of a movie and trying to perfect that. It's imperative to the impact: faster cuts, cuts at the right moments that meld with the tenor of a scene. Creating and maintaining that feeling.
Generally I just pick music that I like. That's the part I really enjoy: When I get permission for the songs I want and put them into the scenes. It's always hard when you're doing a low-budget film, so it's great when you can get all the music you want to get.
I had gotten to know the music scene there, and just fell in love with it. I've lived there a little over four years now. There's a charm to Denton. The musicians in Denton are all very talented, but they're also all very accessible and very community-oriented.
'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script.
I love TV. I know all the theme songs from the shows I watch. I'm not one of those who'd rather be a movie star. I prefer TV because of the rushed way of working-on a movie set, you sit around and wait and wait to do a scene because they're adjusting the lights.
During the time that my recording career seemed to be in a slump a music called disco came on the scene and literally took over radio stations as well as having radio stations created to play it which sort of negated my music as well as that of some of my peers.
New York had a big influence on me growing up, and I was really part of the club scene - the Mudd Club and Studio 54. When you're living in New York, you are just bombarded with style, trying to figure out how to be cool and how to feel relaxed at the same time.
When some people get parts, they feel they can now relax, but for me it was always the opposite. Sometimes before I do a movie or before I act out a scene, I may not sleep well the night before. If I don't know what the scene is about, I might get all worked up.
When you play a lead role, you're in pretty much every scene. It's incredibly tiring. You really have to disappear into the film because you have no time to do anything else. You are either awake and playing the character, or you are trying to catch up on sleep.
Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description.
I made a big mistake with him the first day I shot. We're shooting the scene where I come back from the party, the dance, in the sleigh with Julie Christie and we turn the corner and go past the camera and the camera follows us just a little bit and we disappear.
I like finding stuff that I suck at and trying to get better. So I'm taking classes, getting myself comfortable in an acting scene. You've got to work out those ticks. For instance, standing up used to be really hard for me. I act much better if I'm sitting down.
I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
It doesn't matter if you're doing a studio movie or you're doing an independent movie. When you get to set and you're doing a scene, it's always going to be the same job. I really don't think about my career, in terms of planning it out and what this does for me.
I think there has only been one time in my entire career that I've ever gone back to shoot a scene. And it was a scene that, when we were shooting it, we knew that it wasn't working. We knew there was a disagreement between the actor and director. So, we went back.
I checked myself out in that funeral parlour scene. I saw myself laughing, because there was a shot of Ed and I together and Mary was right in back of us. My head turned from the camera and I saw myself laughing, because Mary was absolutely brilliant in that thing.
I think meeting someone like, meeting Sam Shepard, that was someone who was kind of important for me, because I'd read so much of his work and watched him as an actor since I was a kid, then being on set doing a scene with him and thinking, 'This is really surreal.'
The L.A. theater scene is very different. The perception has been that people who love theater do theater in New York. The people who want to be discovered do theater on the side in L.A. But there are people who are very dedicated to theater who love theater in L.A.
I'm UCB trained - I came up learning about game, which is a really big part of the Upright Citizens Brigade theater. They teach you about game, and game in a scene is what makes the scene funny. And oftentimes, it's the character - this is really improv dorky stuff.
I have kissed in almost all the films except in 'Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai.' I'm not sure if my kissing on screen has anything to do with the success of a film, but producers make sure to put a kissing scene or two. They feel my kissing scenes are my lucky streak.
But it's very difficult, I can tell you I played the Czech Open a few times and it's very difficult just to go on to a scene where the course is prepared differently when the greens are fast and he's not used to it and they're hard as a rock and he's not used to it.
Especially with a comedy, you've got the clear cut goal of trying to make a scene funny. It's not like drama where you're trying to achieve some kind of emotion or trying to further the story along. You're trying to figure out what's the funniest way to do something.
I always found the dramatic side of things easier than the comedy, because there's so many ways to do comedy, and it's also subjective. Someone might not laugh at what you do, whereas if you're going to do a dramatic scene, there's usually only one way you can do it.
Usually, when I read something, I'm looking for the story first. And then, when I re-read it, I check every part of it to see whether every scene is necessary. You imagine yourself watching the movie, to see whether or not you're losing the through-line of the story.
I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way - one solid scene doesn't have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.
When I first got into the music scene, I was inspired by different songwriters. I like to dress from the '50s and '60s. I like to paint a picture of that era through my music and clothes. I am inspired by a whole a lot of things, from doo-wop to gospel and soul music.
I would spend a lot of time setting up an accident scene where it appeared that I had seriously hurt myself - hedge-cutter, ketchup, that sort of thing. When my sister happened upon the scene of horror, I would lift my head and pathetically plead for her to 'get Mum'.
When you're just able to distill it down to the idea and the feeling that a character is experiencing in a scene, it can become very, very razor sharp and really clean and really efficient and simple. And sometimes it takes twenty-five years to learn how to be simple.
'West Wing' was huge. Like 'Hamilton,' it pulls back the curtain on how decision-making happens at the highest level, or at least how you hope it would be. The amount of information Aaron Sorkin packs into a scene gave me this courage to trust the audience to keep up.
There are elements of that, where you'll see a scene again and you'll recognize it, but I wouldn't say it's got one conceit like that, at all. It definitely has those jokes, but it would be wrong to say this is a show where, every time you see it, you see a new angle.
Some of the most fascinating scenes in 'Unforgiven,' for me, is that scene with Gene Hackman where he's talking about the Duke of Death that Richard Harris played, and he's basically demolishing this myth of this man very unwesternly - not what you expect in a western.
My dad took me to all the best rock and punk shows when I was growing up and music has always been a part of my life. So I'm very interested in the music scene and I suppose that's why I've ended up going out with musicians. Dave Pirner is still one of my best friends.
I love Charlie, Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin, and it's the funniest, most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.
Playing a real person, it does add an extra level of thoughtfulness. You're portraying someone who actually existed, so instead of saying, like, 'OK, I think this would make the scene better,' it's more a question of, 'What do I think the real Jeffrey Dahmer would do?'
And the issues I think are important in Louisiana right now happen to be health care and education. And those are two areas that the federal government can play a very important role. And I think I can be effective in trying to help our state from the Washington scene.
For the 'Rai-kirah' books, I began with the image of Aleksander riding the great wastelands, and that quickly morphed into the desert. Because I wanted my slave market cold and miserable, I chose to set the opening scene in the empire's summer capital in the mountains.
People like Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart - all of these artists were what I grew up listening to every day of my life. And there's a very healthy music scene in the west country of England, where I grew up.
That's a really common trap that people in small scenes will start to rely on. They'll have all this material joking about that place, and then take a trip to Atlanta or whatever, and be like, "Half my act is gone because I can't talk about how everybody has a bicycle."
The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.
If you see me when I first burst onto the scene, you see how quickly I could turn for a big lad and how fast I was up and down the pitch. Then I started picking and choosing my time to go forwards because I was scared of my hamstring going or my knee not dealing with it.
I got into shape because I took kick-boxing lessons every day to prepare for a fight scene with Taylor Lautner. I really wanted to lie down and eat Chinese food, but I kick-boxed every morning and ran. If someone was filming you with your kit off, you'd do the same thing.
Because I actually find the next take after they've controlled it a little bit and repressed the laughter is actually a really interesting take, because that's still going on underneath the surface. That struggle to maintain composure becomes part of the joy of the scene.
In film, if you've got to do a scene in a swimming pool, you do a scene in a swimming pool. If you've got to blow up a car, you blow up a car. In theater, you can't do that, and therefore, you have the opportunity to engage the audience's imagination in a way that's rich.
It was like a classic thing with Emma. So I walked in and I slammed the door and everything fell off the wall on the set. It was my second or third scene and I was so embarrassed and scared and so nervous about what everyone would say, but everyone just packed up laughing.
I was this kid, and I was scared to death of all these pros around me... My head would shake, and my hands would shake, and I discovered if I kept my head down and looked up, my head would not shake, so I started to do that when I could, when it was appropriate in a scene.
That's what sets apart one actor from another, and that you can't teach. You can't give someone that. When you're working, putting a character together, or in a scene, that's where things will happen that you have to have the intuition to notice them, and to register them.
A lot of directors are great and they are fine but you know I think that Harry really takes a special point to really engage the actors and really make it feel like a safe place for them to explore whatever it is they want to explore in whatever scene with their character.
First, you do a piece of material that begins and ends and has a flow; it's not chopped up as in a film, where in an extreme case you might be doing the last scene of the script the first day that you go to work, and you don't know enough about the character you're playing.
I enjoy some physical stuff. But if I had a choice between playing a scene where it's raining, it's terribly cold, I'm wet and I'm being drowned and playing a scene with dinosaur eggs in a laboratory, I'd probably take the latter. It's warmer and generally more comfortable!
You do need to edit yourself as you shoot because you have fewer options in a smaller movie. In other words, when I'm shooting a big movie, and I got an 85 day shooting schedule or more, then I'm saying I have enough time to shoot option A and B and C and D for every scene.