Zitat des Tages von Mike Nichols:
It took me forever, learning improvisation, because I had studied with Lee Strasberg - I dropped out of Chicago and went to his classes in New York for a couple of years, once or twice a week. What I didn't realize was I was learning directing because he wasn't all that good about acting, not for me.
I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you. If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives.
Limitations are inspiring: they lead to thinking, so I don't mind them.
Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.
I think the main thing about comedy and humor is that it's impossible and always was impossible to define.
Fear of comedy is all so much about who you do it with.
Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.
In a weird way, when I was looking back, I didn't know I was going to be a director until I was.
I'm an enormous fan of 'The West Wing.' It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week.
Chicago is not a very fashion-driven place. Nobody says, 'Oh, you've got to come see these fabulous people!' Nobody cares.
We are being entertained all the time - in the bathroom, on the train, in our beds. Sure, there is a smaller audience for theater. But we know from radio that entertainment never goes away, it just changes. And more power to it.
Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.
Clay Aiken is amazing beyond that glorious voice. Turns out he is an excellent comic actor and a master of character.
Technically, maybe I learned most of all from George Stevens, and among his movies I learned the most from 'A Place in the Sun.' It's a lesson in moviemaking.
It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.
The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny.
There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.
The things that you saw earlier in your life generally have more power than the things you saw last week.
The degree to which you're peculiar and different is the degree to which you must learn to hear people thinking. Just in self-defense you have to learn, where is their kindness? Where is their danger? Where is their generosity?
Everybody wants to be known. Everybody's a Kardashian.
The only safe thing is to take a chance.
I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.
Improvisation has to do with exploring something like two brothers in a room together. You find out things about situations by discovering the things that they aren't saying. It's a way to explore scenes. Sometimes it's more useful than others, but it's always there to see if there's anything that you might improve.
A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.
That seems to me the great American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
I'm in the theater because of two plays: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Death of a Salesman.'
The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.
The reason that most British actors are better than most American actors in the end is that they don't make any money. At the very end of their lives, they get into a space movie and they make a lot of money, but until that happens, basically, they don't have bank accounts. They live from day to day.
The thing about being an outsider... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.
I loved all movies, literally. I certainly loved 'Shane' and 'Roxie Hart.' Later on, when I was less of a kid, I loved 'L'Avventura' and 'Persona' and all Fellini movies and like everybody else I loved John Ford. Then and now, I loved Preston Sturges, maybe above anyone.
Things come in waves, and I'm always more interested in places like, for instance, Chicago, where people don't follow fashion. They're not galloping past your window on the way to the latest anything. They're living their lives. You do a play, they come and see it and say, 'That's nice', and then they go home.
Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'
'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me.
A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.
Very often when a story really holds us, it gets pushed away because it's too close for comfort.
