I would paint a portrait which would bring the tears, had I canvas for it, and the scene should be -- solitude, and the figures -- solitude -- and the lights and shades, each a solitude.
Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.
Music is so powerful to me. I had my IPod and headphones, and my sad playlist. I kind of ventured off for just a little bit to get into the scene.
You're my best friend in the scene and together we can make sense of what's going on by being Together.
It's funny that some ideas start with a little "What if?" and then suddenly you're spending a million dollars to shoot the scene and hoping that it works.
Mostly I work really unconsciously, and I think if the scenes are really well written, which they are, and if I just throw myself into it, I don't really think about it.
I wanted to be part of a high-class scene of musicians. It was half-inspired because I didn't have many friends, and I was hoping that I would meet people and fall in love and start a community around me, the way they used to do in the '60s.
When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
The talented actor needs craft. When you do a stage play, you do it once each night in chronological order. In a film you're going to wind up doing a scene 15-20 times, just by the nature of the process. If I tell you a joke once, it's funny. The more times I tell, the less funny it is. How do you get to the point where you can laugh again? You also may have to cry again and again.
I've always felt toward the slightest scene, even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say, 'Hi,' that the people ought to get their money's worth and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me.
The scene with Danny [McBride] and the cake and all of that [in the Pineapple Express], most of that is improvised, I would say. But you would never know, to me anyway, and that's what is always amazing.
I was working with Michael Shannon and I was like, "Oh man I'm having trouble with this scene. " And he's like, "Well, then just open it up. " I was like, "But, the mark?" And I was like, what's wrong with me? And he was like, "Dude, what's wrong with you?"
When I watch a movie for the first few times I'm usually thinking about where I was in a given scene, who was next to me, what we were doing etc. But after I've gotten through all of this, when I'm really watching the film itself, then I get moved.
There's nothing sexy about doing a nude scene. It's rather uncomfortable. I like dressing up rather than dressing down.
Eternity! thou pleasing dreadful thought! Through what variety of untried being, Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!
On other shows when they get to the end of the scene, they yell 'Cut!' On Whose Line, we yell 'That's Enough!'
In theater, the scenes I like the most are the ones where you are there and you cannot talk.
When you're doing those operation scenes, you not only have to be on top of the dialogue and the rhythm of the dialogue and what's happening dramatically, but you've got to technically get the rhythm right, so that everything is fitting with the dialogue at the right time. And you're performing the operation to the audience that's watching it. Thackery has to present it, as well. In some ways, that's the most challenging.
For a director, the most challenging scenes are the dialogue scenes.
Reflection is a scene that I will cherish forever.