There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.
So I was determined to use my last two years in college doing something I thought I would enjoy, which was acting. And it was probably because there was girls over in the drama school too, you know?
I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.
The country is lyric, the town dramatic. When mingled, they make the most perfect musical drama.
Drama and comedy, to me ,are all about being surprising, coherent, and true, all at once.
A person like me. . . isn't even worth the tip of a toe. I can't even compare to half.
Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?
I want to do drama, light comedy, the whole range.
It wasn't like, 'I'ma lose weight and start doing dramas. ' I wanted to be healthier, and that was the impetus for wanting to lose weight - it's just about being healthy and feeling good.
With a lot of the movies that I've done, they've been both dramas and comedies from Shanghai Noon to Billy Bob Thornton's second movie, Daddy and Them, to just a bunch of movies that I have done have been comic, and they're usually from a cynical kind of pessimistic point of view which is probably my sense of humor, and this is a part of myself in everybody that I play.
The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
I was viewed as a little bit of an outcast. I didn't have one group of friends who I hung out with every single day. I would have friends on my football team, friends in drama, friends in video production, and I would hand out with different people. I know that wasn't the normal thing to do in high school. The normal thing is to be ina group or be part of a clique. But for me, I love hanging out with different people and just having fun.
Making this movie as a period piece about a period that was very recent in people's minds. I was in Taiwan [during the 1970s], so I hope I did all right. Otherwise, it could be the biggest embarrassment of my life. Also, the story is not linear, it's patchy, like a cubist painting, and there is always the possibility it will not hold together, it will fall apart. The tone is part satire, part serious drama, part tragedy, all mixed together, and it has to hit an emotional core. That's also very scary.
We Irish prefer embroideries to plain cloth. To us Irish, memory is a canvas--stretched, primed, and ready for painting on. We love the "story" part of the word "history," and we love it trimmed out with color and drama, ribbons and bows. Listen to our tunes, observe a Celtic scroll: we always decorate our essence.
The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics who moonlighted in the arts. They worked both sides of the street, so to speak.
My heroes are Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman. Those are the two actors that both do comedies and dramas, seamlessly. Also John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman. They're all just great actors, neither comedic nor dramatic. They're just great actors.
When I left school I went to Australia for a year and worked in the drama department of a school in Perth.
Documentaries are unpredictable. You never know what will turn up, and the drama occurs in real time. But if you listen to people, a narrative always emerges.
If you consider it valuable, it will grow valuable.
I think that's actually what draws me to family stories: the various roles we each play with each member of our families, and how different they can be from who we are with our friends and partners and lovers. I'm endlessly fascinated by how we navigate these family dynamics; they are the dramas each of us live out day after day, often in ways we don't even realize.